Digital agronomy company CropX will supply soil sensing and its AI-powered agronomy platform to the Lincoln University McCain Foods NextGen Regenerative Farm in New Zealand, an eight-year research programme comparing regenerative and conventional farming over a full potato rotation, PrecisionAg's Global Ag Tech Initiative reported.
Researchers will examine how farming practices affect soil health, crop performance, water and nutrient use, resilience and long-term productivity. CropX's Apex soil moisture probes, 60 or 90cm deep depending on the crop, will sit in every crop of the rotation, and their readings will be combined with weather data, actual evapotranspiration measurements and satellite imagery. The platform will support variable-rate irrigation, show real-time soil moisture differences between treatments, and help time sprays through its disease warning system.
"Water use efficiency and optimal irrigation application is important for crop quality, yield and environmental stewardship," said Josh Opas, McCain's director of agriculture for Australia and New Zealand. Professor Alison Bailey, head of farms at Lincoln University, said research of this scale "depends on continuous, high-quality data collected over many years". Eitan Dan, chief revenue officer of CropX Technologies, said the biggest advances in regenerative agriculture would come from "credible evidence generated under real farming conditions".
McCain has committed to regenerative practices across all the acreage that grows potatoes for the company by 2030, and long-term demonstration farms such as this one are meant to test those practices under local conditions and share the results with growers. CropX says its system is used in more than 50 countries.
For potato growers anywhere, including in South Asia where irrigation costs and water shortages squeeze margins, trials that measure soil moisture continuously over a whole rotation are the kind of evidence that can show whether a practice saves water without costing yield.
Photo: Christianjhart1 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
Source: PrecisionAg
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