Norfolk grower David Hurn walks his winter wheat crops with his agronomist in March and spots yellow rust, and then uses his digital farming tool to tell him when best to spray.

He grows a number of “dirty” varieties of wheat susceptible to diseases, such as Barrel, Skyfall and Firefly, and his agronomist will highlight the best fungicide product to use, while the digital service tells him when to get the sprayer out.

Mr Hurn says the digital system he has chosen gives him value for money as it arms him with the information to be more timely with his fungicide sprays.

“The advantage is that I can walk the fields with my agronomist, and then turn to the model for fungicide timing and weather-pattern information,” he says.

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Accurate weather data

Mr Hurn has linked the two weather stations he has on his farm in north-west Norfolk into the digital system to give him very accurate weather information.

He farms 145ha of light silts to heavy clay silt arable land at Eastgate Farm, as E & M Hurn, just a few miles west of Kings Lynn, and started using BASF’s Xarvio field manager digital farming system in 2020.

In combination with a neighbouring farm, they crop winter wheat, spring barley, spring beans, potatoes and onions, in an area on the edge of the Wash with a fairly low annual rainfall of 625mm.

He moved to precision-farming in 2013, then to Xarvio last year and says he finds field manager an easy-to-use platform accessible from a mobile or desktop device, giving real-time data and modelling, and good cross-terminal compatibility.

Last season, due to the very wet autumn of 2019, he only managed to drill one field of winter wheat, but he used the system’s scouting app for weed identification for young weeds, such as clearers and black bindweed, and also for disease identification.

Trials

The field manager system was launched in Britain in January 2020, and is now being used on more than 2,500 farms, with the aim of improving crop production from drilling to harvest via data-driven agronomic insights.

It looks to predict crop growth stages based on drilling dates, weather and variety, and gives alerts for optimal timing of sprays, full options for what product to spray, and can give growers alerts for disease outbreaks.

There are currently trials being undertaken on 12 farms – from Fife in Scotland down to Kent, and from Shropshire across to Suffolk – covering winter wheat, winter and spring barley and oilseed rape.

On winter wheat at 11 trial sites, variable-rate fungicide applications used at the T1 and T2 timings gave an average yield increase of 0.18t/ha, or a 1.8% rise, says Xarvio agronomist Anna Crockford.

This extra yield, and assuming a grain price at £160/t with cost savings made at T1 and T2 of £12.42/ha, gave an extra margin over input costs of nearly £42/ha, she adds.

How much it costs

The system was developed by Bayer, but when the German company bought Monsanto it was forced to divest this digital farming tool in 2018 under EU merger regulations.

Since then, new acquirer BASF has worked on launching it in Britain, and now the package comes in three cost levels – a free basic service, and then £200/farm and £500/farm depending on the level of sophistication, with Mr Hurn using the top level.

The company says the free service is on offer currently, while two fields are completely free with all the full modelling of the most expensive package.