Sustainable pest management technologies to improve yield and support net zero in apple production

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Spotta develops 24/7 smart insect monitoring systems and sells these as a service that alerts growers to harmful pests before they cause damage, enabling them to intervene at the right time, in the right place and with the right techniques.Insect pests are a key challenge in agriculture. Monitoring insect pests has until now been difficult in practice and labour intensive, this is currently further challenged by increasing labour costs and shortage. Our technology allows continuous monitoring of insects. We achieve this with low cost IoT monitors that attract and image the target pests. Images are transmitted to our server where data from multiple monitors are combined to give real-time tracking of populations. The system sends real time alerts to growers which prevents damage, limits the use of pesticides, gives farmers peace of mind and reduces cost.The overall vision for the project is to reduce carbon emissions by ~6% in the £67Bn apple cultivation industry by reducing both the use of agricultural inputs and losses to insect pests through advanced IoT technology. We will enable the optimal management of 3 moth pests (codling moth, summer fruit tortrix moth, light brown apple moth) in apple orchards to minimise pesticide use, increase productivity, crop yield and profitability for UK farmers, and reduce carbon emissions. This will be achieved through the use of Spotta's insect monitoring technology platform, which consists of direct insect sensing along with the use of indirect sources of information like localised weather monitoring which can be combined with modelling of insect populations to predict population dynamics further increasing the accuracy of the service.