Category Archives: Conference

Conference, LandWISE People, Nutrients, Research, Soil

Matthew Norris

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Matt Norris is a research associate at Plant and Food Research within the Sustainable Production (Field Crops) team in the Hawke’s Bay. 

Matt has a background in soil science and chemistry and a keen interest in sustainable nutrient management including modelling nutrient losses from arable and vegetable production systems.

Matt is responsible for leading and managing a range of environmentally focused research projects. His primary focus areas relate to nutrient management, specifically quantifying N and P losses from arable and vegetable production systems. Additional areas of research include N mineralisation dynamics from dairy effluent amended soils and developing novel soil testing approaches for informing N management decisions.

Matt will present both a talk and a practical demonstration on  a Quick Test for Nitrate, a way to rapidly determine how much available nitrogen is in the soil for crops to access. LandWISE and Plant & Food used this in our Onions NZ /SFF research this season to determine how much fertiliser we might apply when we had areas with different size canopies.

You can hear and discuss this with Matt at LandWISE 2018 in Havelock North on 23-24 May.

AgTech, Conference, Data Analytics, LandWISE People, Precision Agriculture

Shane Wood

A LandWISE 2018 invited speaker, Shane Wood’s topic is “Information from grapevine to desk for timely decision making”. He will explain how apps and cloud systems can replace bits of paper and get information where it is needed in the most timely fashion.

Shane has always been passionate about harnessing the power of data to produce powerful information for better business insights.  For over 25 years his company, Information Power, has delivered software solutions for Healthcare, Education and Emergency Management sectors.

Information Power launched Vinea five years ago to provide growers in the Viticulture and Horticulture industry with software that dramatically simplifies the collection and management of data associated with resources (labour, equipment and consumables), crop measurements (qualitative and quantitative) and environment. In the last year processed over 3 million transactions through the Vinea Cloud saving growers time, eliminating paper and delivering new insights.

Aside from being a statistician and data scientist, Shane is also passionate about Argentine Tango and is preparing for LandWISE 2018 by spending two weeks dancing in Buenos Aires.

 

Agronomy, AgTech, Conference, LandWISE People, Plant Health, Precision Agriculture, Research, Sensing

Sarah Pethybridge

Assistant Prof Sarah Pethybridge‘s career spans from Tasmania, through Plant & Food Research in New Zealand to Cornell University in New York. She has a focus on vegetable disease management, and a goal to provide reliable information to vegetable growers and industry stakeholders to encourage adoption of durable management strategies and tactics.

A LandWISE keynote presenter, she described leading techniques and technologies to help optimise control tools and reduce the frequency of false positive or negative decisions.

Sarah told us, “We are now in the second year of our project with the center for imaging science at Rochester Institute of Technology looking at hyperspectral data to detect flowering in snap bean to optimize timing of fungicides, and using canopy density as a risk factor. We are also expanding this work into beets to detect and differentiate abiotic and biotic stress. In the digital agriculture arena, we recently released three apps on disease detection, quantification, and spatial analysis of epidemics using pixelated data.”

Sarah’s travel to New Zealand is supported by Cornell University,  McCain Foods, Heinz-Wattie and AGMARDT

 

              

Many thanks to AGMARDT, sponsors of our international presenters 

 

AgTech, Automation, Conference, Data Analytics, LandWISE People, Precision Agriculture, Robotics, Sensing

Nicholas Woon and Matthew Warner

Nick Woon and Matt Warner co-founded Acuris Systems in 2016.

Acuris Systems is developing orchard management systems that provide robotics, data capture and analytics for kiwifruit growers, to detect disease, forecast yield and increase grower knowledge of their orchard and its variability.

Nick and Matt are presenting at LandWISE 2018 on the topic, “A robotic platform for canopy monitoring“.

Nick says, “At the moment we are focusing on accurate fruit counting using photogrammetry and neural networks. Utilising the recent advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we aim to analyse crop, detect disease and forecast yield. Beyond just analysis we want to develop a solution that will robotically automate the kiwifruit growing processes, including the culling of flowers, spraying of pesticide and picking of the fruit itself.”

The Acuris robot is a smaller, three wheeled machine designed to carry cameras and other sensors around kiwifruit orchards.

For something a bit different, check out K9 the walking quadruped, one of Matt’s earlier prototype robots. 

You can meet Nick and Matt at LandWISE 2018: Technologies for Timely Actions, 23-24 May 2018 in Havelock North

AgTech, Automation, Conference, Data Analytics, LandWISE People, Sensing

Mark Bart

Metris Principal, Mark Bart, is an atmospheric scientist with deep interest in air quality and weather forecasting. With long experience in atmospheric measurement including cloud physics, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology and atmospheric dynamics he knows how important sensors, sensor maintenance and data quality are if you want to make good decisions.

At LandWISE 2018, Mark and University of Auckland colleague Kevin Wang will talk about maintaining data quality in field sensor networks – those much talked about hundreds, thousands and many thousands of gadgets that are going to be sending massive amounts of data from our farms and orchards through the Internet of Things (IoT).

Sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) offer timely decision making around disease modelling, spray-application, irrigation control and frost-fighting.

Mark says, “If we are going to make decisions on the basis of data, an important question is: ‘How good are the data?’ This question need to be answered in a reliable and timely manner so that the correct decisions around crop management and sensor servicing can be made, and that the chance of bad decisions are less likely to occur.  Our experience shows that as the cost of the sensors comes down, the cost of managing the sensor network and keeping it calibrated goes up.”

Come to listen and discuss sensors and quality of data with him at LandWISE 2018: Technologies for Timely Actions.

AgTech, Automation, Conference, Data Analytics, events, LandWISE People, Precision Agriculture, Research

Matty Blomfield

Matty Blomfield co-founded Hectre, a company developing and offering orchard management software.

From launch, Hectre  expanded to NZ and Australia and helped track over 50,000,000 apples in its first 10 weeks of operation.

A LandWISE 2018 invited speaker, Matty’s topic is “Understanding the customer to make orchard data easy”. That’s a concept that applies across all sectors. 

Matty tells us, “We believe technology is moving rapidly and will impact the way we grow tree crops forever. There’s no limit to what’s possible. We are a small agile team that are committed to helping growers realise leverage future technologies to the fullest – the same way technology has changed the office environment. We are excited to do our part to feed the world!”

Hear Matty speaking at https://techweek.co.nz/whats-on/2018/landwise-2018-technologies-for-timely-actions-80/

Agronomy, AgTech, Conference, Data Analytics, LandWISE People, Nutrients, Plant Health, Precision Agriculture, Sensing, Soil

Michael Nichols

Michael and Rochelle Nichols and their six children have a mixed farming enterprise at Sisters Creek in Northwest Tasmania.

The family crops Wheat, Pyrethrum, Poppies, Potatoes, Onions, Canola, Mustard, Peas, Buckwheat and run 80 Friesian steers. Michael has a contracting business which provides muck spreading, spraying and combine harvesting through which he buys local wheat and barley to on sell to local dairy farmers.

The closing of a vegetable processing plant in the state prompted the family to diversify and invest in canola oil. The canola is cold pressed and sold in cubes or bottled for retail sales. 

“The oil business is ticking along nicely.  We’re providing chickens with canola meal and the cold pressed canola oil is going mostly to the Japanese catering market, as they prefer the GM-free status. We go through about 120 tonnes of seed a year and produce roughly 50,000 litres of oil.”

Michael is a very passionate farmer and is using NDVI images to improve and even up crop yields with variable rate spreader applications and is verifying the results using yield data.

Michael is an invited international presenter at LandWISE 2018

Michael’s attendance at LandWISE 2018 was supported by AGMARDT

Conference

2017 Conference Roundup

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In all 120 people came together for LandWISE 2017: Are we ready for automation? As always, it was a full programme and much talking between sessions. Thanks everyone for your involvement!

Two dozen speakers from England, France, Australia and New Zealand covered topics from the economics of automating apple harvesting through hyperspectral imaging, open government data, onions, irrigation, and robots that pick kiwifruit or prune grapes.  To all our speakers, a very big thank you.

Amanda Lynn brought a different perspective to the conference, leading us to consider the human side of technologies including automation through both her main presentation and the Dinner Panel she facilitated.

Chris Roberts and Rob Fitch beamed in from England and Australia and Thibaut Delcroix came over from Toulouse.

The Conference included updates from our joint Plant and Food and Onions New Zealand Sustainable Farming Fund project, “Enhancing the profitability and value of NZ Onions“.

You can get a glimpse of all the presentations through our Discussion pages. Select “Conference” from the categories to direct to the conference activities. You can also follow individual speaker’s and their topics via the Conference Programme pdf.

For the first time ever we cancelled our field session due to saturated soils at the MicroFarm site. Instead we held most demonstrations at the conference venue. Thanks to the demonstrators for tweaking your activities to suit.

We are very grateful indeed to our sponsors old and new. It’s their support that makes it possible to run and event like this at an affordable price. We are privileged to have solid and long term  support from many of these organisations especially our Platinum Sponsors; Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, BASF Crop Protection and John Deere.

We also thank AGMARDT for once again sponsoring our overseas speaker, Thibaut Delcroix from France. We look forward to continuing our relationship with all our new supporters.

We’ve had a lot of very positive feedback which does make the effort feel worthwhile. Of course we also want to know if there are things our delegates, sponsors or presenters think might be better so don’t hold back. We want to improve so feel free to drop us a note.

 

 

Agronomy, AgTech, Automation, Conference, Drainage, LandWISE People, MicroFarm, Nutrients, Precision Agriculture, Projects, Sensing, Soil

LandWISE 2017: Are we ready for automation?

In 2017 our 15th Annual Conference focuses on automated tools for data collection, decision making and doing actual tasks on the farm (and beyond).

  • What do you want?
  • What’s on offer?
  • How will farms and management have to change?

We have a comprehensive programme. We’ve gone a bit outside the box to bring a variety including from outside the horticultural and arable sectors. We find cross-pollination and hybrid vigour valuable!

So register, come along and listen to excellent presenters, discuss the ideas with colleagues and go away with new understanding and plans.

Thanks to Our Loyal Platinum Sponsors!
Many thanks to AGMARDT, sponsors of our international presenter, Thibault Delcroix, France

Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, John Deere and BASF Crop Protection are our Platinum Sponsors again in 2017. Many thanks to these loyal supporters who have backed the Conference for a number of years.

We also welcome our Gold Sponsors, meal sponsors and  trade displays new and old. These are the organisations that make conferences like this possible and affordable.

Join them and us at the Havelock North Function Centre on 24-25 May 2017 to mix with leading practitioners, farmers, growers, researchers, technology developers and providers.

Register now – click here!

 

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LandWISE 2017 Sponsors

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Thanks to Our Loyal Platinum Sponsors!

Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, John Deere and BASF Crop Protection are our Platinum Sponsors again in 2017. Many thanks to these loyal supporters who have backed the Conference for a number of years.

Many thanks to AGMARDT, sponsors of our international presenter, Thibault Delcroix, France

AGMARDT is again supporting LandWISE activities and providing assistance to bring our international Speaker, Thibault Delcroix from Naio Technologies in France. We are just one of many conferences enhanced by AGMARDT in this way.

We also welcome our Gold Sponsors, meal sponsors and  trade displays new and old. These are the organisations that make conferences like this possible and affordable.

We welcome PGG Wrightson as a new Gold Sponsor in 2017. PGG Wrightson has a close match to the work in which LandWISE is involved and FruitFed Supplies is one of our MicroFarm sponsors.

Horizons Regional Council is again supporting the Field Event and Process Vegetables New Zealand and Vegetables New Zealand continue their overall conference sponsorship. Thank you all.

Vinea and GrowMaps join LandWISE for the first time in 2017.

Apatu Farms, Netafim, Ballance AgriNutrients, Eagle Technologies GPS Control Systems, WaterForce, HydroServices and Plant and Food Research are continuing their solid support with trade display, meal and conference sponsorships.

The field sessions will be held at the LandWISE MicroFarm. This only operates through the high level of support we receive from sponsorship of land, equipment, products and advice.

Thank you to all our sponsor and supporters!