HUGH Lowe Farms Limited

Ensuring food and nutrition security has been a constant struggle throughout human history, but perhaps never more so than now with a rapidly increasing global population (estimated to reach 9.7bn by 2050), the current challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and more locally, the legacy effects of BREXIT. Traditional production...

Agrivoltaic technology allows dual use of land, combining agricultural production with photovoltaic electricity generation. We have already reported how innovative tinted and semi-transparent solar panels could utilise 'spare' solar irradiation for electricity production when installed above growing plants. Applying these, and newly developed flexible agr...

Agrivoltaic technology allows dual use of land, combining agricultural production with photovoltaic electricity generation. We already reported how innovative tinted and semi-transparent solar panels could utilise 'spare' solar irradiation for electricity production when installed above growing plants. Applying these, and newly developed flexible agrivolt...

World Resources Institute figures suggest that a third of all food produced is wasted, explaining 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions and $940B economic losses per year. This project will focus on waste reduction in strawberry production (average waste 9%, about $1B globally) but the approaches developed will be applicable to other fruit crops too. Pick...

Raspberries are fragile fruits that require significant manual labour to harvest. The raspberry industry has seen significant growth in production due to consumer demand, but the cost and availability of labour is threatening its economic viability. This project will produce a proof of concept raspberry picking robot that will demonstrate the approach req...

Strawberry harvesting is a labour intensive task that depends critically on the availability of a large amount of low-cost labour. Growers are increasingly vulnerable to labour market price fluctuations and burdened by high employment overheads. Building on Dogtooth's proof of concept strawberry picking robot (developed during Innovate UK project Ananassa...