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10th October 2018 – Forbes

How Farmers Are Using Drones and Data To Cut Costs

For thousands of years, farming involved making judgments about water, fertilizers or new seeds with the human eye. Today farmers are using machine-learning tools to boost their yields and help their bottom line.

One London-based agtech startup has spent the past two years building software that can scan a field and build a map for tractors and other farm machinery to follow, helping bring farming costs down.

Hummingbird Technologies, which has a staff of 40 and is on course to book $1.5 million in revenue for 2018, hires drone pilots to make detailed aerial photos of fields.

These photos can, depending on the quality of the camera, show detail down to a single blade of grass. The images are analyzed by Hummingbird’s software, which counts the plants in a field, measures each one’s height, “canopy” coverage and leaf area, or scans the plants for early signs of disease.

Its software uses computer vision, a form of machine learning, to identify acres of weeds or chlorophyll concentrations more quickly than a single human could.

“We’re picking up readings that tell us about biomass, color, canopy vigor, chlorophyll, to infer how healthy the plant is … in the same way a doctor would monitor the human body,” says Hummingbird’s founder, Will Wells, from the startup’s office on Soho Square in Central London. Such details are more difficult to obtain by satellite, he argues.

The service costs Hummingbird’s customers, who manage farms in the United Kingdom, Australia, Ukraine, Russia and Brazil, roughly £5-20 per hectare per a year, depending on the data they want to collect and utilize.

Hummingbird thinks it can get that price down if farmers start using their own drones. A decent drone that can spend an hour flying autonomously across a typical 500 hectares (about one-and-a-half times the size of New York’s Central Park) might cost a farmer about $20,000, says Ed Plowman, chief scientific officer of Hummingbird. But the investment might be worth it.

With a 100-megapixel camera, farmers can photograph a field to half a centimeter per pixel. Hummingbird’s detection system needs drones to fly out every two weeks on average, but some crops, like potatoes, need more regular flying—every three days or so.  “Our secret sauce is in the imagery,” says Wells.

His business model is another example of the gradual step change from Big Data to artificial intelligence. Hummingbird doesn’t just collect a database of numbers but also translates them into decisions about how to irrigate or spray chemicals on a field of corn, potatoes or rapeseed.

Its platform sends those instructions to a farmer in the form of a “shapefile,” a file format with geolocation and topographical data that can be plugged directly into farm equipment with a USB flash drive.

Farm tractors have been using GPS positioning for years, and the advancement has already allowed farmers to save tens of thousands of dollars annually on fuel, Wells says, adding that his software represents the next step in farming efficiency.

Wells, who grew up surrounded by farms in Dorset, England, got the idea for Hummingbird during his hospital visits to get treatment for cancer. He believes that image-recognition technology—similar to the kind Facebook uses to scan photos for tagging or that Apple uses to unlock the iPhone X—could support disease diagnosis in plants. Doctors are already using the technology to detect diseases in humans, using MRI scans for instance.

Plowman, the chief science officer, joined the company from British chip designer ARM, where he was head of machine learning. Hummingbird’s machine-learning technology is similar to the the ad-targeting software used to profile people and show them hyper-personalized advertisements online, he says.

In the case of crops, Hummingbird is building a profile of a field, taking into account variables like the weather, soil and date, and creating a personalized instruction set. 

The instructions, which look like a multicolored grid, tell a tractor how much fertilizer or water to spray in specific blocks of 200 square feet, with each block about the size of a single-car garage. Tractors are typically fitted with nozzles that adjust the amount of chemicals they spray based on the shape file.

Cutting costs here can make a big difference to a farmer’s bottom line. An average, 500-hectare field of canola, for instance, would need to be sprayed up to ten times over roughly seven months, says Wells, costing around $400 per hectare, or $200,000 for the season.

Adjusting those nozzles to spray only what each 20-meter section needs — according to the height of the crops or existing nitrogen content—can mean a cost saving to farmers of around 10% or more, he says.

“We’re moving towards a world of perfect information,” Wells adds. “Crops are a factory with no roof on. At some point in the not-too-distant future, whether it’s government or food companies or farmers, anyone involved in farming that needs to eat will have perfect information as to what’s going on.”  

16th March 2018 – Farmers Weekly Interview

Tech Company builds clever maps to make sense of crop data

Inside a few shabby-chic ex-safe rooms in London’s famous Hatton Garden jewellery quarter, some of the best and brightest minds are refining and polishing a technological diamond that is set revolutionise applied agronomy.

Backed by heavyweights of both the tech and farming worlds, imagery and data analytics company Hummingbird now offers a wide range of products that help crop producers become increasingly more efficient.

From its days as a start-up at the Imperial College Incubator innovation and entrepreneur hub, the company launched into agriculture full time in 2016.

Its advisory board now includes the head of Google UK and farming giant Velcourt’s technical director, Keith Norman, and its mission is to take a farmer’s crop imagery data and produce something that can directly influence management decisions in real time.

The returning data – of which, a shape file containing an input application map is one example – must also be affordable and provide a tangible return on investment, according to Hummingbird’s CEO Will Wells.

“Effectively, we are using drone, satellite or plane imagery, combined with machine learning algorithms to solve practical management problems, alleviating the issue of walking and scouting for assessing crop development, disease and weeds over large areas of land.”

How does it work?

Hummingbird has a team of 40-50 CAA-qualified drone pilots – many farmers and junior agronomists – that fly over crops and capture image data using state-of-the-art multispectral cameras.

The data is then transferred into its cloud-based platform, where Hummingbird’s expertise comes into play.

Its 23-strong team of tech wizards includes data analysts, image processing experts, software engineers, machine learning specialists, remote sensing professors and bioinformatics whizzes recruited from across the world.

They have created a programme that begins to process the information automatically as soon as it hits the cloud and, within hours, its machine learning algorithms – a software process that learns and produces predictions from data – will have produced any number of desired analytics, depending on customer needs.

These are available to customers within 24 hours via Hummingbird’s online platform on computers or mobile devices.

All data is in a form that is transferable into software systems such as GateKeeper or, if required, machine control units for variable input applications.

Precision products

About 120,000ha of UK arable land was covered for about 100 customers during the 2016-17 cropping year and is set to rise to between 200,000ha and 300,000ha this season – hinting at a rapid rise in demand.

On top of the increased interest in the UK, the firm has also expanded into grain-producing giants Brazil, Ukraine and Russia.

Customers growing a range of crops including wheat, barley, oilseed rape, sugar beet and potatoes can access a wide range of precision farming products via the platform (see table).

These include anything from basic field variability mapping for highlighting problems affecting crop development, to variable rate maps for nitrogen, plant growth regulators or crop desiccation sprays.

Plant counts in root crops are also possible to help inform the need for re-drilling and a yield prediction tool can allow beet growers to better plan lifting schedules late in the season.

It is paid for on a subscription basis, which includes a set number of drone flights at critical growth stages and costs £20/ha/season for wheat, barley, oilseed rape and sugar beet and £25/ha/season for potatoes.

At present, the company’s biggest cost is piloting the drones and this is reflected in its price structure.

However, Mr Wells expects these costs to come down as more agronomists, farmers or farmer groups invest in their own drones with cameras and is something the company is firmly in favour of.

“Right now, the hardware [drone with camera] would cost a little less than £10,000 and for a big farm, payback on that would be palatable, but [technology] costs are coming down all the time,” he says.

The company can also tap in to the Planet satellite platform, which has a daily revisit and resolution down to 0.8m/pixel, which can offer farmers a more cost-effective option for more basic crop analysis.

“The spatial resolution of satellites is also improving and cloud-penetrating technology will also make it more reliable in the future,” adds Mr Wells.

Getting meaningful data

Mr Norman says there have been “pretty pictures” of fields circulated in crop sector for years, but except for nitrogen application maps, which are well understood, there has been no clear direction on data interpretation and its practical application.

“There are an awful lot of biomass maps, for example, that give a generic feel for a field without honing-in on what the information actually means and if you need to do anything on the back of that information to make a difference.

“One of the things I’ve been passionate about is getting meaningful data from the field with the precision and scale we need to make interventions in an appropriate way,” explains Mr Norman.

An example is Green Area Index (GAI) in oilseed rape, which is intrinsically linked to yield and for a 3.5t/ha crop a target GAI of 3.5 is required. Each GAI unit requires 50kg/ha of nitrogen.

There are apps that take 1m square images to give a GAI figure and a decent general idea of crop nitrogen requirements, but a Hummingbird-analysed drone image of the whole field down to 2cm/pixel accuracy takes canopy management to a new level.

First, variable rate nitrogen application plans can be drawn up for each pixel grid to achieve optimum canopy size.

Second, spring plant growth regulators (PGRs) can also be applied where most needed using variable rate maps. This is vital, as applying PGRs to plants too small can cause yield loss if taking a blanket approach across a field.

Third, areas of high GAI do not need early applications of nitrogen so applications to those areas can be later in the season, prolonging the life of the crop and extending seed fill.

“At £30/ha for some oilseed rape PGR products, it is very cost-effective to have variable maps and the savings per hectare will pay for an extra sprayer pass,” explains Mr Norman.

Research and development

While the company has a suite of products that are tried and tested and provide the core offering to subscribers, it has a heavy focus on research and development and a long pipeline of new precision tools in development (see panel below).

The nature of building algorithms means that each requires a vast amount of ground truthing and Hummingbird demands a minimum accuracy of 80% before any soft commercial roll out.

Development will be accelerated by a recent round of investment that netted the company £3m, which included a European Space Agency award, and a further European Innovation Partnership Award will be spent on expanding field trials and improving its technology.

Mr Wells says engaging with customers – mostly agronomists and top-end farmers – is also crucial in the development of new innovations, because the more year-on-year data and feedback they can obtain, the better Hummingbird’s algorithms will become.

“It’s not as difficult to get to 80% accuracy as it is making small gains beyond that 80%, and that’s why we want to keep farmers in the ‘feedback loop’. It is an opportunity to improve our machine learning and we very much value that feedback,” he adds.

This is particularly crucial to the “Holy Grail” of accurately identifying pre-symptomatic disease – something the company is in the latter stages of being able to achieve.

When Hummingbird’s software identifies what it believes is yellow rust in a wheat crop during imagery processing, if the farmer validates in the field for the company, he or she will receive £5 as an incentive.

It is also conducting split field trials using its asymptomatic assessment of disease in wheat ahead of the T2 fungicide timing, which aims to help improve timing and fine tune rates.

Agronomists will be engaged in ground truthing and working alongside the EIP-Agri Award project, which is being managed through the Rural Payments Agency (RPA). Results will be published on a new website to show what the technology can do and the return on investment it can provide.

The path ahead

On a basic level, Mr Norman says the Hummingbird model will help to counteract the disadvantages of farms getting bigger, where crop management can suffer because of diseconomies of scale.

The development and introduction of more advanced remote sensing and biosensor technology – such as electronic noses that can smell plant pheromones released when under pest attack – is also gathering pace.

This will provide accurate pictures of where weeds, pests and disease are and allow precision pesticide application on an unprecedented scale.

With drone spraying unlikely to be allowed in the UK, the more realistic target is having four or five crop protection products on a sprayer and using direct injection technology to mix and match the applied pesticides on the go, according to detailed application maps.

“The transition is going to be gradual, but Hummingbird is paving the way and will be an integral part of integrating sensing technology and farming.

“We probably won’t see it for at least another five years because at present, the data analysis is outstripping the development of the technology for the actual application on the ground,” adds Mr Norman.

See the original article at:

https://www.fwi.co.uk/machinery/tech-company-builds-maps-sense-crop-data

15th March 2018 – Prosperity Conference Speech

“Across the UK there is a wealth of innovative start-ups redefining what it means to be a farmer or a land manager, and how to farm effectively and sustainably. One company, Hummingbird Technologies uses crop mapping to identify problems in drainage, compaction, nutrition, weeds and pests before they become devastating, and it can pre-emptively detect the presence of particular diseases like potato blight and blackgrass.”

The full transcript of the speech can be found here: 15th March – Prosperity Conference Speech

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/green-brexit-a-new-era-for-farming-fishing-and-the-environment

7th March 2018 – AgFunder

Dyson Founder Backs Remote Sensing Agronomy Platform Hummingbird in £3m Series A Round

Hummingbird, a UK-based remote sensing startup has raised a £3 million ($4.1 million) Series A round to expand its platform on three continents.

Investors in the round include The European Space Agency, Sir James Dyson, the inventor behind and founder of the Dyson company, Newable Private Investing and Velcourt, the UK’s largest commercial farming operation.

Hummingbird uses all three remote sensing technologies, drone imagery, aerial imagery, and satellite imagery combined with weather and soil data, and processed using artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities plus plant pathology, to make yield predictions, manage nitrogen levels, and diagnose disease in crops including soybeans, oilseed rape, cereals, sugarbeets, peas, and potatoes. These recommendations can help farms mitigate disease, optimize yield, and apply fertilizer in a more efficient way.

Though the startup began as a drone-focused precision agriculture company two years ago, it evolved beyond drones as the team realized that the method of data collection is secondary to the data itself.

“The key is to focus on the crops and be able to take in data from anywhere,” said CEO Will Wells.

Founded in the UK in 2016, the company has in the last year expanded onto two additional continents, working in Russia and Ukraine as well as in Brazil.

Wells told AgFunderNews that apart from being good for business, the expansion has also been advantageous scientifically, giving the company more growing seasons and more varied climates to learn from.

“Having a double-hemisphere, multi-seasonal, machine learning model is a total game changer: we can run the algorithms across borders and through the seasons,”  he said.

Though Russia was a hard market to crack, Wells said that the country, notorious for having the largest farms in the world, offers new dynamics that fit well with remote sensing technology.

Wells said that on farms of 80,000 hectares or more, remote sensing can offer value that is less relevant elsewhere, like spotting theft of materials and identifying mismanagement.

“The farm sizes are unfathomable and it works a lot better for remote sensing… in the UK people care about every square meter. In Russia, people want to know which of my 30 fields are doing the best.”

Russia presented other challenges too; Hummingbird, which has partnered with Google UK since the company’s early days, had to find new cloud services partner in Russia, for example.

Despite their size, Russia’s farms are not known for their productivity and there Hummingbird feels it can make a big impact, which Wells says is the whole ball game for remote sensing startups.

“The penetration of cutting edge technology is still quite low. The challenge is actually giving farms something of value. People are bored of pretty pictures. People are bored of ‘give me your data and I’m going to give it back to you,’” he added.

In an effort to possibly create a rising tide for all remote sensing boats, Hummingbird is working on a £100,000 government-funded pilot project in the UK to quantify and publish the impact of Hummingbird’s tech on both farmers and environmental stewardship efforts.

This is the first agtech investment for the European Space Agency, which is invested in roughly 10 startups from life sciences to drones, to medtech.

See the original article here: https://agfundernews.com/hummingbird-raises-seriesa-remote-sensing.html/