Potato Review

22 POTATO REVIEW MAY/JUNE 2022 BAYER CONFERENCE we have a legislative framework with defined mechanisms for calculating the impact of certain activities and guidance on the type of practices which will fall outside the scope of regulation, we will have to make informed judgements, but we are making progress and can contribute to the coming debate,” Marc said. Having validated the model, Bayer is expanding the scope of the project to include data from machinery and farm management software. This will be incorporated to finalise project learnings before it is introduced to more partners in the potato value chain. “The pilots are progressing well and there is interest from companies throughout the value chain. All parties are united in their desire to produce a carbon neutral potato and there is recognition that as the market develops, growers will have credit to trade,” he said. With the market for carbon trading schemes still in its infancy, there was a need to consider how it might develop and whether it will support ‘offsetting’ whereby credits are traded outside the crop in which they were incurred, or ‘insetting’ whereby they are retained in the value chain. “Ultimately, they serve a greater purpose in helping to promote sustainability if they are retained within the value chain of the given crop. They can also be traded with greater transparency if linked to a ton or hectare of crop,” he says. Further development will take place over the next two years before hopefully coming to the market in 2024. Bayer has identified a number of countries including the UK for the initial launch. FieldView takes data analysis up a level Bayer’s FieldView is a global platform for the collating and analysing of field data to support more informed crop management. From satellite scans to crop protection and fertiliser applications to yield data, the maps can be viewed side-by-side or viewed separately depending on the user’s requirement. “The value to the user is that the data is in one place where it can be easily analysed to identify the impact of previous decisions – this is likely to be of interest to those using variable rate practices – and support data driven decision making for better performance,” Edward Lawton-Bradshaw, Bayer Climate Activation Specialist, says. “The user can import boundary data from other crop management software, so enabling satellite images for your farm going back to 2017 to be viewed. This can be particularly useful when looking at new parcels of land where the cropping history and performance is not known,” he adds. FieldView is integrated with CLAAS and John Deere systems and synchronised with Gatekeeper to ensure accurate records, remove duplication, and satisfy farm assurance requirements. The user creates an account online (with support available) before installing the necessary applications on an iPad. To capture data from machinery with the FieldView drive, an iPad is required (currently) but data can be viewed on either Android or Apple iOS. Data can be shared with partners at the account holder’s discretion and images can be filtered by crop or variety and ranked by field. The user can also toggle between vegetation (biomass) and scouting imagery. Biomass images are better suited to analysing crop emergence and canopy development, whereas scouting images are popular for prioritising crop walking or identifying specific problem areas in a field. “The algorithm behind the scouting image differs slightly from that used to display biomass by being biased towards highlighting the variation within the field to make it easier to identify areas in need of greater management attention,” Edward says. “Different forms of image can be produced depending on the purpose. Water-use maps, which show crop transpiration in millilitres per day, are valuable for irrigated crops, as the variation in uptake can be easily compared. This helps as much with irrigation scheduling as it does with application rates.”