Farmers Guardian report that for years the Innovation awards recognised and rewarded innovation and advances inside the agricultural industry. Celebrating new advances and providing exposure to agricultural manufactuers, the awards are back and better than ever.
The entries were Judged by a panel of industry experts, according to a range of criteria including design innovation, practical impact, sustainability of product and its impact on the environment.
The Arable Innovation and Future Farming Innovation awards went to Opico for its FarmDroid, a fully autonomous, solar-powered robot capable of precision drilling and weeding.
It uses ultra-accurate GPS to record exactly where it places each seed. Then once switched into weeding mode and for every subsequent pass, it has no need to identify what is a wood and what isn’t, it just knows where the crop was planted and works around each plant. It uses hoes running between each row and blades slice off anything between each crop plant in the row.
Ag-Drive picked up the first prize in the Digital Innovation section. It is an all in one cloud-based app for agricultural contractors and farmers.
The manufacturer says it is the most cost effective way to manage your farm business from receiving a job from the farmer, scheduling the job to the operator and sending the invoice directly through Ag-drive.
It also works with accounts packages such as Xero, Sage and Quickbooks, making the system all entirely paperless with full traceability and accountability throughout and PDF job reports which can be attached to every invoice.
