Dr Charles ‘Merf’ Merfield is running an updated version of his non-chemical weed management workshop. Merf is an international researcher on non-chemical weed management. He has 30 years practical and research experience in non-chemical weed management including inventing a range of weeding machinery.
Topics covered include: the context of weed management; essential weed biology and ecology; integrated weed management; plus detailed coverage of field operations and machinery. It will also cover the significant advances in electrothermal weeders that are a substitute for glyphosate, as well as robotic weeding which has been advancing at incredible speed.
The workshop will be at the Agrodome in Rotorua on Tuesday 26 July, from 9am to 5pm. Cost is NZ$450.00 excl. GST.
David Manktelow founded Applied Research and Technologies, providing contract and independent research work in horticultural plant protection, pathology and spray application technology.
A life-long innovator, he constantly seeks technologies that do tasks better. Whether simple strips of water sensitive paper or a fast laser scanner, he finds ways to help growers constantly improve practices.
At LandWISE 2021, David described the Green Atlas system of automatic counting and mapping of flowers and fruit in orchards. Together with Fruition Horticulture’s Jack Hughes, David has trialled the Green Atlas system in Hawke’s Bay and displayed the equipment at the field event.
Green Atlas Cartographer is a combination of hardware and software that allows flower and fruit counts to be quickly and accurately mapped over entire orchards. An unprecedented level of detail allows crop management to be tailored to every tree.
Matty Blomfieldgrew up in a small town in New Zealand. He took a chance and moved to Japan at 17, and later New York to broaden his view of the world. When he asked growers and packhouses what their biggest problem was they answered, “How do I know what fruit I have to store/pack/sell?”
Committed to reducing the amount of fruit wasted globally, by giving growers the platform to capture data, analyse their orchard in ways they’ve never done before, and improve the consistency of high quality, safe fruit, Matty co-founded Hectre to provide an orchard management software tool. Their super quick and simple fruit sizing app, Spectre, is an example of the innovation they’re bringing to the fruit industry.
Spectre uses computer vision AI technology to detect fruit size and colour, all from the simple click of an iPad or iPhone. Sample sizes captured by Spectre are 100 times those obtained in traditional sizing practices and accuracy levels are extremely high at 95%+. Results are served up within seconds making Spectre the simplest, fastest and most accurate, portable computer vision fruit sizing tool available on the market.
Genevieve is a kiwifruit grower and founder of PicMi, a digital platform connecting horticultural work with workers.
With a foundation in spatial design, she joined PWC as an Experience Designer, scoping and shaping work, and creating a platform and accelerator for new ways of working. Supporting clients with their strategic initiatives, she specialised in group facilitation, design thinking and provide neutral, safe discussions around the strategic or tactical needs of the business.
Her mission to create straight-through seasonal hiring was born from Genevieve’s first-hand experience of the frustrations of hiring for her family’s kiwifruit orchard in the Tasman. She stepped in to help when her father had a serious tractor accident, and came face-to-face with the pain and time pressures of trying to find seasonal staff.
At LandWISE 21, Genevieve will outline the problems she encountered, and her path to finding a solution and creating a business to make the process of engaging with growers and workers easy, and meeting the many aspects of compliance.
Matt Flowerday has been involved in farming and horticulture his whole life.
Matt started using GPS to map farms and orchards in 1998. In 2001 he set up GPS-it to carryout GPS mapping, with a focus on kiwifruit.
From beginnings in a small office on a kiwifruit orchard, with just one staff member and a GPS unit, the business has evolved significantly. GPS-it is now an established aerial farm mapping and software development company, providing high-quality customised geospatial solutions to our clients, using ESRI technology.
At the LandWISE 21 Conference, Matt will show how Landkind, an interactive platform that lets orchards and packhouses unlock the value of their maps, improves productivity and profitability by allowing users to create, manage, and interact with orchard data effortlessly.
Hamish Penny started the electric weeding company Weda Tech in 2019. He has a passion for solving problems with technology.
Hamish was introduced to agritech in his final year engineering project which focused building an electric weeding device.
Since then, Hamish has completed a Master’s in Engineering and worked on several projects including Weda Tech, which aims to commercialise the unique equipment he has developed to provide weed control options for farmers.
Electric weeding is the destruction of weeds with high-voltage electricity. Differentiating it from other non-chemical weed control techniques, electricity allows a systemic kill of a whole plant, low energy usage, minimal soil disturbance, operation in wet soil conditions, and can control weeds in close proximity to crops – even when touching.
Weda Tech was founded to harness the inherent benefits of electrical weed control and use a precision approach to develop novel equipment that can control the widest variety of weeds in the widest range of environmental conditions. The focus has been to build highly flexible pulse generation equipment and powerful measurement techniques to allow understanding of the way weeds respond to specific treatments.
There are some obvious synergies between electric weeding and image-based weed recognition and robotics, that could be combined to maximise the capabilities of electrical weed management.
There are a few start-up companies around the world developing and commercialising electric weeding equipment, including Rootwave (who have recently been collaborating with the Small Robot Company), Crop.Zone and others. Weda Tech is focused on thinking about the problem differently and through an understanding of the optimal dosage for a specific weed in specific conditions, is creating solutions that solve the most significant problems faced by farmers.
A strip weeding device is currently under development, with a 10-20cm wide electrode that could control a strip next to a crop or, be combined in parallel to control any width of paddock.
The current research device will also be developed into a site-specific weeder that can control low weed densities, with a robotic or human arm guiding to the target weed.
Rob Elstone is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hortworx and owner of RBE Automation.
Coming from a background in aviation, commercial and industrial electrical, Rob was Lead Automation Engineer with Fruit Handling systems and subsequently Compac Sorting.
Having spent the last 7 years in the fruit industry, Rob’s passion for machine building has led to the launch of Hortworx’ flagship products, the Robotic Bin Filling range.
With the goal to improve the efficiency of Packhouses and Orchards, through the smart use of robotics, Rob has a vision to maintain the human machine collaboration through “Inclusive Automation”.
At LandWISE 2021, Rob will talk about the development of products for the horticulture industry. He will have equipment on display at the field event.
LandWISE runs on a voluntary membership basis with an annual subscription of just $100 for the current year. Subscriptions are now due and our Financial Members will be getting their invoices sent out shortly.
If you are already one of our Financial Members, Thank You! Can you please help us again by recommending us to a friend?
We haven’t changed our subs for years, but are starting to review that. What would be best, is if more of our followers chose to join!
If you’re getting and valuing our newsletters, downloading and listening to our podcasts, accessing the resources on our website or the FertSpread tools etc. please think about giving us a hand. It really will only cost you about half a cup of coffee a week, but it will make a big difference to us.
How does LandWISE fund its activities?
Our overheads are kept rock-bottom. The MicroFarm, our offices and equipment are provided as an in-kind service by Page Bloomer Associates. Our Board is voluntary, and we meet mostly by email and video conferencing. But we do need to pay accountants and insurance and run websites and the other things every organisation has to do.
Our major activities are funded on a project by project basis. That means we need a lot of support from co-funders so we can access (hopefully) various reasearch and extension grants such as MPI’s Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures fund (SFFF). Our Conference too (as podcasts in 2020!) also relies on a number of loyal sponsors and the delegate fees we collect.
Merf explaining cover crops and catch crops at the LandWISE AGM
All these things cost a bundle. If we can get more members, we can increase the amount of work we can self-fund and provide more member services.
Please consider becoming a Financial Member today. Click the link, fill it in and we’ll flick you an invoice. (and we’ll cover the cost of our own coffees!)
A silver lining on the Covid-Cloud is online conferences. Here’s one few of us in this part of the world would get to, but now it’s an online event, attendance is just a click away!
Since 2016, the International Forum on Agriculturral Robotics FIRA has been must-attend event for professionals in the agricultural robotics sector. Initiated and organized in Toulouse by the French company Naio Technologies, FIRA is now presented by GOFAR – the association Global Organization for Agricultural Robotics, founded in 2019.
GOFAR is launching the virtual edition of its annual event, which runs from 8 to 10 December, 2020. FIRA 2020 will provide international participants with online live access to speakers, booths tours and interactions with exhibitors and other participants, and will thus become the social network for agricultural robotics.
This 3-day new format combines innovation and quality online experience for a sector that has a key role to play to address thcurrent environmental, economic and social issues. For those of us in another hemisphere, presentations wil be available to registrants to access as soon as they have been aired.
Dr Charles ‘Merf’ Merfield is running an updated version of his non-chemical weed management workshop. Merf is an international researcher on non-chemical weed management. He has 30 years practical and research experience in non-chemical weed management including inventing a range of weeding machinery.
Project Wrap-up and Trial Results
David Manktelow
Genevieve is a kiwifruit grower and founder of 
Hamish Penny started the electric weeding company Weda Tech in 2019. He has a passion for solving problems with technology.
Rob Elstone is the Co-Founder and CEO of 
