Project Overview
A UK agricultural technology company wanted to build a precision agriculture platform for UK arable farmers — ...
Technology Stack
Compliance & Standards
The Challenge
A UK agricultural technology company wanted to build a precision agriculture platform for UK arable farmers — integrating satellite imagery, soil sensor data, and weather data to provide field-level crop health monitoring, variable rate application maps for fertiliser and pesticide, and Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme compliance reporting. UK GDPR for farmer data, Environment Agency precision farming data standards, and Defra SFI reporting API integration were the primary compliance requirements. Budget: £100,000.
Our Approach
Satellite Imagery Integration
- Sentinel-2 satellite imagery (ESA Copernicus programme — free, 10m resolution, 5-day revisit) via Sentinel Hub API.
- NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index) calculation per field polygon: identifies crop stress areas.
- RGB, NIR (near-infrared), SWIR (shortwave infrared) bands for crop health analysis.
Field boundaries
integration with Rural Land Registry API (Defra) for farmer-owned field polygon data.
IoT Soil Sensor Network
- LoRaWAN soil sensors (temperature, moisture, nitrogen levels at 3 depths) deployed per field.
- AWS IoT Core + TimescaleDB for sensor telemetry.
Anomaly detection
ML model (Python scikit-learn isolation forest) flags sensors outside expected seasonal range.
Alert routing
farmer push notification (React Native app) and agronomist email.
Variable Rate Application Maps
- Variable Rate Application (VRA) map generation: NDVI spatial analysis → crop stress zones → recommended nitrogen application rate per zone (kg/ha).
- Export in machine-readable format compatible with John Deere Operations Centre (ISO-XML), Case IH AFS Connect, and CLAAS telematics platforms.
- UK FACTS (Fertiliser Advisers Certification and Training Scheme) alignment for nitrogen recommendation methodology.
Defra SFI Compliance Reporting
- Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme requires evidence of soil health actions.
- Platform auto-generates
SFI evidence pack
- soil sampling records, cover crop monitoring (Sentinel-2 NDVI for cover crop verification), and no-till compliance verification.
- Defra SFI reporting API (beta) integration for direct submission of scheme evidence data.
The Results
Platform live at 16 weeks, £92,000 — under budget.
Farmers enrolled: 280 in first 6 months (62,000 hectares monitored).
NDVI alerts: 34 crop stress events detected early — average 2-week earlier intervention vs manual scouting.
Fertiliser saving: 18% average reduction in N application (VRA vs flat rate) — £67 per hectare average saving.
SFI evidence generation: automated — previously 2 days per farmer per year.
“The SFI evidence automation alone saved our farmers 2 days each of paperwork. The NDVI early warning caught a fusarium outbreak in one field 3 weeks before it would have been visible on the ground. The VRA nitrogen saving of 18% average is financially significant and environmentally important." — CEO, UK AgriTech Company (name withheld)”
Project Details
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