Agri-Tech Week will explore changing times for farming

This will be a key question for this year’s Agri-TechE REAP conference on November 10, the virtual event at the centre of Agri-Tech Week 2021.

Discussions will include sowing and harvesting at the optimum time to maximise crop yields, whether staggering the harvest could reduce pressure on labour and storage, timely interventions to reduce livestock diseases and lameness, forecasting demand for perishable goods and automation to extend the working day.

There will also be a focus on manipulating biological clocks to control the timing of germination, reproduction and maturity, and to optimise crops for controlled environments.

One of the keynote speakers is Prof Alex Webb, whose team at the Department of Plant Sciences in the University of Cambridge discovered the timing mechanism in plants and how it can be controlled. Their work includes long-term wheat trials with NIAB (National Institute of Agricultural Botany).

He said we are at a tipping point where “we’ve got the fundamental biological knowledge about the circadian rhythms in plants and we’ve got the means to exploit it – from expensive automation like robots, cheap automation like smart irrigation, smart data analysis tools and the ultimate: Controlled Environment Agriculture.”

He added: “This knowledge introduces the question: do we aim for potentially high-benefit, high-risk approaches, or do we go for incremental benefits, such as incorporating this clock information into smart agriculture to slightly change the timing of a few activities? That is a question for the farmers and growers.”

There’s a saying in agriculture: “The difference between a good farmer and bad farmer is a matter of days” – and that’s because timeliness is everything, said John Barrett, director of the Sentry farming group, who farms in Hedenham near Bungay and is chairman of the Agri-TechE stakeholder group.

Sentry director John Barrett (left) and senior business adviser Alec Smith monitor their farms' productivity using Yagro data analytics (Image: Archant 2021)

“The difference between making a profit and a loss, especially with commodity crops, is actually the timeliness of getting the crop in the ground when the conditions are right,” he said.

“Harvesting on time is an issue in fresh produce – but for wheat, barley, rape, getting the crop established quickly is crucial.

“Conditions change so quickly from being too dry to too wet and that’s only getting worse with climate change as we’re seeing more extremes of weather.

“Achieving that optimal timing is crucial and to help farmers make better decisions now we need better knowledge of what’s going to happen in the future, so technologies that provide forecasting and prediction will have a big impact.”

The conference, organised by Agri-TechE, will also explore how East Anglian farmers and innovators can learn from the challenges facing growers around the world.

Dr Belinda Clarke, director of Agri-TechE (Image: Agri-TechE)

Director Dr Belinda Clarke, recently named by the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association as the winner of the 2021 Timothy Colman Prize for her “outstanding leadership in the agri-tech sector”, said this year’s event would bring global visitors and vital international insights to the industry’s shared challenges.

“The challenges facing salad producers in the Netherlands, fruit farmers on the US West Coast and livestock producers in Missouri are very similar to their counterparts in the UK," she said.

"By working internationally, early stage agri-tech companies can quickly gain the economies of scale that are needed to create robust, cost-effective products and services for the home market.

“This international conversation is therefore vital, not just to stimulate the growth of individual companies but also for the future competitiveness of UK agriculture.

"At successive REAP conferences we have invited overseas speakers with muddy boots and inspirational ideas to share their learnings with us. Min-till from Argentina, precision agriculture from China and biological farming from the US Mid-West have all featured.

"The feedback from across the world is that you need to try things in field conditions and share the experiences through informal and formal networks.

“Interestingly, this year we have also attracted participation from the Middle East – UAE and Israel – and the Far East. Their interests are more aligned with future challenges of farming: extreme environments and how to integrate food production into urban environments.”

• For more information, see www.agri-tech-e.co.uk/event/reap2021/