New tool allows for more accurate yield management

Irish ag-tech company Agri Technovation has developed a new harvesting tool that collects location data, enabling farmers to easily determine the number of fruit produced in a specific area in an orchard to an almost per tree basis.

The Picklogger, which recently won the innovation award at the Biostimulants World Congress, is mounted on the clippers used by harvesters and collects location data as workers manually harvest the fruit from the tree.

The GPS coordinates gathered with every snip are sent to the cloud and combined with weight data to produce harvest progress maps. The accumulated data assists farmers in making critical in-season decisions.

At the end of the harvest, the yield maps produced from the recorded data are collated with other available agricultural information, such as soil classification, soil chemical analysis, leaf data, irrigation data, pest data, etc., to allow well-informed decision-making and the formulation of corrective strategies.

According to Erald Smith, head of Agri Technovation’s services portfolio, Picklogger is the first fruit harvesting tool of its kind that collects such accurate location data and incorporates it into yield maps.

Up to now, producers could only look at an orchard’s performance from an absolute average perspective with data provided from the packhouse and other harvest monitoring systems. In other words, the farmer gets a value of x tonne/ha for orchard A and y tonne/ha for orchard B.

Agri Technovation claims Picklogger facilitates insight into the performance of orchards on a much deeper level than was possible before. Its datasets and comparisons are made available through the company’s Myfarmweb platform.

“The greatest benefit or value-add is that it allows the agriculturist in cooperation with the producer to home in on the variance within each of the orchards and accordingly develop corrective management strategies,” Smith said. “The eventual result is increased harvest yields over time.”

He said the enhanced level of in-field data measurements that the Picklogger collects also creates opportunities for a variety of other insights. A radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag that marries each fruit-pick to a crate or bin used in the harvesting process, allows Picklogger to integrate with packhouse systems.

The company claims using the Picklogger with RFID tags facilitates the creation of employee efficiency statistics and indicators that can be used in-season for greater employee productivity. With a fully integrated application, it also enables more accurate traceability from the fruit on the retailer shelf right down to an almost per tree basis.

“Currently the traceability detail stops at orchard level, but Picklogger can overcome that ‘last bridge’ that connects the fruit on the retailer’s shelf to the tree in the orchard where the fruit was produced,” Smith sai