Soilessentials Limited

"There is an urgent agronomic (reducing the amount of plant protection products applied to crops), environmental (pollution reduction), economic (lowering the cost of food production) and political (continuing public pressure for a reduction in ag-chem use) need to modernise and update agrochemical applications to crops from the traditional practice of ap...

GrassVision will use imaging and precision agriculture techniques to develop a novel spray apparatus for precision application of herbicides to broad-leaf weeds in grass crops. The GrassVision consortium consists of imaging experts (Center for Machine Vision, UWE), data analysis experts (Aralia Ltd.) and precision agriculture experts (SoilEssentials Ltd.)...

Providing sufficient food to feed an increasing global population is challenging given limited resources. Soil is a key component of food production providing nutrition and organic matter. However, modern methods of crop production have resulted in degraded soil leading to reduced yields. This contributes to the so-called yield gap, the difference between...

Yield instability negatively impacts UK soft fruit growers, preventing accurate profit prediction and maximisation, causing volatility of UK supply. The problem is now well recognised within industry, though the causes of significant season to season yield variation are unknown. This proposal aims to identify the physiological and biochemical processes un...

Potato late blight is one of the world's most destructive crop diseases, with £3.5Bn annual losses globally in an industry suffering stagnant yields for the last decade. This project will develop a rapid acoustic biosensor device for in-field identification of air-borne sporangia of Phytophthora Infestans (causal agent of late blight), to meet the compell...

The potato industry has witnessed a 10-year long yield stagnation; coupled with increasingly stringent demands on potato quality, there is a compelling need for farmers to increase marketable yield. This project aims to develop an innovative spatial crop model & integrated decision support system for improved variable rate seed planting, fertiliser use & ...

To integrate spatial agronomic data layers with a point crop model to generate an enhanced spatial cereal crop model to improve in-season management.

New crop varieties that can tolerate abiotic/biotic stresses are essential for maintaining crop productivity in current and future growing environments. Breeding stress-tolerant crop varieties, however, is limited by the precision and throughput of plant phenotyping. This project will develop and apply a novel tractor-mounted platform for precise and high...

This project will develop a radically new software technology by exploiting cutting-edge computation for complex data analyses, for application in precision agriculture. Soil Essentials, a precision farming SME, will produce an integrated software solution to present high-resolution field data to growers and agronomists to inform early decision making. Th...

Soil Essentials is a leading precision-farming SME based in Scotland becoming increasingly engaged in innovative R&D to boost agricultural productivity. A major challenge exists with detection and control of cyst nematodes (CN), which are currently associated with UK economic losses of £38 M pa. With the additional pressure of the foreseeable nematicide b...

The CropForecast project proposes to improve crop disease forecasting using high resolution earth observation data, accurate digital elevation models and local weather data. Such improvements will increase the efficiency, sustainablility, and profitability of crop production.The current approach to crop disease forecasting has limited spatial resolution a...