BIFGA Technical Day 2023 – The Fruit Grower

About 100 growers and other members of the UK’s top-fruit sector gathered at George Chambers’ Northiam Farm for the 35th BIFGA (British Independent Fruit Growers Association) Technical Day.

Omnia

James Lane, digital services specialist for Hutchinsons digital farming system, Omnia, gave his presentation to the BIFGA group whilst standing on a stack of wooden pallets, but fortunately Omnia looks to be a much sturdier platform. He explained: “What Omnia does very well is to take data from anywhere, so we call it a ‘brand-agnostic platform”.

The BIFGA group was reminded that Omnia enables growers and agronomists to import existing data, such as information gained from precision-farming systems like Greenstar, into Omnia, so that all their information is in one place. From here they are then able to use Omnia to help them with many different farm-related management decisions, such as the fine-tuning of their farming plans and the creation of handy prediction models for frost and scab risk. He added: “Once you’ve got that [data] in, you can then build up your areas – stewardship margins, floor margins, all the sort of things that you would map on your farm. So, we can add map layers for pretty much anything.”

James also reminded growers about TerraMap – a soil mapping tool that creates a variation map of a farm that shows, for instance, the overall soil texture and the sand, silt, and clay content of the soil.