Following over four years of development, PGRO has launched the Vining Pea Tool, designed to predict the optimum harvesting time for UK vining peas.
According to the company, it will reduce the cost of harvesting low-quality crops, smooth the intake flow at freezing plants and minimise the time taken to check crop maturity.
If 80% of the industry adopts the technology over the next five years, PGRO estimates a £30 million cost saving for the UK vining pea industry.
The system uses remote sensing, machine learning, weather patterns and historic yield data to increase the harvest forecast from two days to ten days, as well as provide yield predictions.
“The machine learning aspect of the tool is incredibly powerful,” said Leah Howells, the PGRO data scientist who has led the work. “If you feed in a large amount of data, it will pick apart and find trends and patterns in that data which can then be applied to new data, allowing you to make more accurate forward predictions on unseen data.”
The tool is updated daily, providing information to the grower on a single screen. It can also take into account the variety’s yield and maturity traits.
“Right now it’s incredibly difficult to predict harvest date in peas, with the current heat-based methods becoming less accurate as temperatures rise and drought-like conditions become more common due to climate change,” Leah added.
“PGRO wanted to develop a model that could withstand a changing climatic landscape, could work well into the future, and be flexible enough that it could be used by the whole industry, and that what this tool is.”
The Vining Pea Tool is available now on a subscription basis. For more information go to www.pgro.org