South African fruit and field-crop farmers can now carry a scouting guide in their pocket. Farmer's Weekly has reviewed three digital tools available in the country: two free identification apps from the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), one for avocado and one for mango growers, and Syngenta's Cropwise Operations, a subscription farm-management platform that joins field scouting to satellite crop monitoring.
The problem they address is timing. Regular scouting lets a farmer find pests, diseases and other problems before they do serious damage, but a grower has to recognise what is on the leaf or fruit and decide whether it is worth treating. The apps provide crop-specific identification guides, monitoring instructions and management information; the larger platform lets farmers and agronomists record observations in the field, map problem areas and follow crop conditions over time.
AvoPDI, developed by the ARC and drawn from its avocado identification guide, is meant for small-scale, emerging and commercial avocado growers. It helps them identify pests, diseases and beneficial arthropods, with notes on life cycles, monitoring and symptoms. It also covers nematodes, nutrient deficiencies and herbicide damage, which can be mistaken for pest or disease injury, and has an interactive map of avocado cultivars, control measures and further reading. Its scouting section explains monitoring as part of integrated pest management, so that a grower decides whether to act on what is actually present rather than spraying by routine.
MangoPDDDI, the ARC's second app, does the same for mango growers: it covers pests and diseases with identification guidance and control measures, plus physical damage and disorders of fruit and trees, so that a grower can tell different causes of a symptom apart. A scouting module supports regular orchard inspections to judge whether a problem is present, how severe it is and whether the current measures are working. Both ARC apps are free on Google Play for Android phones, and both are presented as references that support, rather than replace, an expert's diagnosis.
Cropwise Operations goes further. Scouting tasks can be created by hand or automatically, and scouts file reports with photographs and notes from the mobile app, which synchronise with the online platform. The system adds satellite imagery, vegetation monitoring, weather information and field zoning, and it sends alerts when vegetation indices fall so that inspections can go first to the parts of a field that need them. Depending on the service, it also keeps historical crop information, yield estimates, fertiliser and seed distribution maps and farm activity records.
The app works offline once its data has been synchronised and uploads reports when a connection returns, which matters on farms with patchy mobile coverage. It is free to download, but only registered Cropwise Operations users can use it, and access to the wider service is arranged with the provider on commercial terms.
The story was reported by Octavia Avesca Spandiel for Farmer's Weekly.
Photo: Edrean / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). A young high-density Maluma avocado orchard in South Africa.
Source: Farmers Weekly South Africa
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