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.
