A new potato-specific smartphone app has been developed to help growers improve crop management and marketing decisions right through the supply chain.
Developed by the Peterborough-based potato supplier Greenvale AP, the Crop4Sight app’s first key feature improves understanding of how crop development will impact on marketable yield.
Many growers will start the season with a planned tonnage from each field, but environmental factors have the potential to throw those plans into disarray. Armed with the Crop4Sight app, users enter observational data on yield potential, crop emergence, canopy development and absorbed radiation.
These factors are then combined with varietal traits, the commercial purpose of the crop – fresh, processing or seed? – and yield dig data to present a benchmark of how a crop is performing.
These factors are then combined with varietal traits, the commercial purpose of the crop – fresh, processing or seed? – and yield dig data to present a benchmark of how a crop is performing.
Yield digs and size grading to monitor what is happening in potato ridges can be a tough, laborious task and, typically, wide size bands are used to speed the job up, compromising accuracy.
Source: Farmers Weekly Online. Photo by Tim Scrivener. See also on FWI: Are 100t/ha potato crops possible?
