TUBERSCAN-VENTURE: Delivering a commercially-viable, non-destructive, data driven pipeline to quantify root crops during growth to realise maximum marketable yield and help reduce waste, contributing to net zero emissions

The potato industry is worth £4.7Bn to the UK economy, but margins are tight and reducing farm waste is a high priority. The size profile of potatoes is crucial information; if the tubers are too small then they will not be within specifications for customers, while tubers that are too big lose market value and this can be a massive source of waste. Potato farmers typically undertake many destructive trial digs of a handful of plants during a growing season to see how big their potatoes are getting -- they then assume that the potatoes they have dug are representative of the entire field. Nevertheless, around 12% of potatoes tend to be outside of the peak marketable range, probably because growth varies across a field, and this costs farmers up to £180M per annum. In years where extreme weather occurs, losses can be substantially higher and in 2022 some fields produced close to 100% of potatoes that were too small.

We have been developing technology that can use remote sensing to gather information across an entire field to model the way that potatoes are growing while they are still under the ground. We fuse data obtained from cameras, such as plant spacing and stem count, with below-ground sensing of the mass of potatoes. A sophisticated model, based on agronomic knowledge and parameterized with significant amounts of background data acquired over several years, is used to predict marketable yields across the field.

We have already developed the technology to a full demonstrator model, capable of predicting marketable yield to ~75% accuracy. We now need to optimize various elements of data collection and processing across different potato varieties and soil types. We also need to ensure that our forecasting model is accurate at all stages of the growth curve of potatoes.

This project will bring us closer to commercialization of this key technology, that has application across potato farming worldwide, as well as for other root crops.