With an increased work load, we’re looking for a self-motivated person to join us. You’ll be curious about transforming agricultural practices, keen on technology and pragmatic. You’ll enjoy working with growers, researchers and tech folk.
We’re not quite sure what to call the job: coordinator, advisor, officer? We know it offers diverse activities and needs excellent communication skills and practical knowledge of horticulture and technology. For the right person, this is a role with considerable potential to grow.
Your role will be to help run trials and extension activities and be part of identifying opportunities to improve economic and environmental performance in horticultural production.
We’ve just started new projects.
Our “Future Proofing Vegetable Production” project has a significant element of on-farm monitoring and field trials to help assess the realistic approaches fresh vegetable growers can take to reducing the loss of nitrates. It includes using new techniques to monitor soil nitrate levels, running on-farm trials to test new approaches, calibrating fertiliser application and irrigation equipment and testing new nitrate mitigation techniques.
Our “Smart tools to improve Orchard Drainage” project is using high accuracy GPS to map and model orchard drainage, and control land shaping equipment to ensure surface water can flow off during heavy rain events.
The LandWISE MicroFarm has just been land levelled and we are monitoring the effect of that, while we wait for a new series of cropping trials over coming years. In the past we’ve tried manipulating peas, changing bean planting arrangements, and mapping onions from satellites, UAVs and tractors. Now we’ve got a list of public and private trials in waiting.
Previous LandWISE projects include precision mapping vineyards to increase juice quality,
testing a small autonomous weeding robot,
the impact of banding fertiliser rather than broadcasting it, 
and how changing irrigation nozzles can affect application uniformity.
We prepared guidelines and calculators to calibrate fertiliser spreaders,
led work on soil quality, novel crop canopy assessment technologies and tested satellite-augmented GPS positioning.
And of course, we helped introduce RTK-GPS and Autosteer, pioneered strip tillage and worked to prevent wind erosion and improve soil resilience by adopting minimum tillage techniques.
If you think this is the job for you, please send us your CV and a letter explaining why you’re the perfect candidate. Applications close very soon on Thursday 20th September 2018. We look forward to hearing from you!