NIAB

Contact: Michael Gifford <Michael.Gifford@niab.com>

2021 project: Virtual Agronomist

Background:

Using pesticides in an effective and responsible way is a critical step in both reducing the quantities used and ensuring their impact on the environment and the health of farmers and consumers is minimised.

NIAB holds one of the most comprehensive pesticide and plant protection products databases in the UK. This database is used by farmers and agronomists to search for products to use to protect their crops from pests and diseases. There are many complex restrictions around the use of pesticides including: timing of application and growth stage of the crops, pest thresholds, maximum dose rates and number of applications, to name a few.

NIAB would like to leverage this database to help advisors verify that their pesticide recommendations are valid according to label restrictions by building an ‘Agronomy engine’. The agronomy engine will accept an input consisting of a list of pesticide applications and use the information in the database to validate the input. Additionally, the engine should be able to account for approved tank mixes (combinations of pesticides in the same application) as recommended by the manufacturer.

We would like the agronomy engine to report on the geographic locations of the queries (at county level or equivalent) and the nature of the queries in a consolidated way.

Feedback:

This looks like a nice application. I think I would include a pointer to the the technical approach that might be involved - it looks as though classical expert systems methods might be an appropriate way to encode regulatory constraints, tank mixes and so on. Representing all the relevant knowledge in a way that can be checked and modified by agronomists, while offering clear advice to farmers, should be an interesting challenge.

2020 projects

• Automating Crop Canopy Data Collection for Crop Management
• Collecting Farm-sourced Data on Pest and Disease Pressure

NIAB is the UK’s leading Crop Science research centre. Within our portfolio of research we develop digital models to describe and predict crop development. This has significant implications for agriculture and more widely with regards availability of food.

We have a number of problems which I think would make interesting 1B projects and I was wondering what the process and timings are for submitting proposals?