Outfield Technologies Ltd

The Sustainable Nitrogen Application Project (SNAP) will develop techniques for precision application of nitrogen in commercial apple orchards. Standard industry practice is to apply a uniform rate of fertiliser across an orchard or vineyard at set times in the season. However, different trees and different regions in the orchard will have different requi...

Fruit growers in the UK are facing an unprecedented set of challenges, including a changing climate, shortages of labour and rising input costs. To face these challenges, the UK fruit production sector is undergoing an enormous digital transformation to become more data driven. Commercially available systems are now gathering data from satellites, drones,...

Global food systems are facing ever increasing pressures. A growing population with increasing demand for high nutrition food is being limited by food poverty, resource scarcity, climate risk and environmental concerns. The recent report "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World" from the UNFAO highlighted the urgent need for data-driven deci...

Current tree fruit production applies crop management products uniformly across each orchard, however, orchards exhibit substantial variation across them and between trees. Even neighbouring trees have very different growth and crop loads. Treating all trees uniformly regardless of their size, density, crop load, or health limits yield, is inefficient, an...

The UK wine industry is growing rapidly in size and in sophistication. But even as British wines are winning more and more awards, the industry faces rising labour costs, changing climate conditions, and pressure to reduce reliance on fertilisers and chemical agents. We believe the solution to these challenges is to adopt a data-driven approach to farming...

A report released in June 2021 by WWF & Tesco found that globally 15% of food is wasted before it even leaves the farm gate. The majority of this waste occurs in middle- and high-income countries across Europe, North America and developed Asia, and one of the key reasons is human factors within the supply chain. Another report in March this year from WRAP...

COVID 19 has severely stressed orchard fruit supply chains as demand has risen, supply chains have faltered and international imports become uncertain. Growers this season are expecting labour shortfalls, or to use inexperienced local labour, and fruit is now of increasing importance. Growers currently manually collect limited data in a time consuming and...

"There is substantive tree-to-tree variability in tree structure (size, density) and crop load and quality in tree fruit orchards which are the major causes of less than optimal, often poor, overall yield and quality. Previous work in Innovate UK project 101405 showed that tree-to-tree variability in yield ranged from 2-3 fold in the six most productive a...