As Belgium’s biggest service provider for agriculture and horticulture, AVEVE is continuously looking for innovative solutions. In plant breeding we’re looking to improve the objective quality assessment of our new crop seed varieties. Collecting these data more quickly and efficiently is key to give our farmers the best possible product they need.
With mapEO, a new image processing solution for drone based phenotyping, we can scale up our seed and agronomy expertise and offer the best possible varieties for every farmer. Let me take you to one of our experimental fields in Neerhespen where we grow 350 different plant varieties on 2100 trial plots.
How we use drones to lift plant breeding to a higher level
Group AVEVE offers various farming and agricultural products and services such as livestock, seeds, farming machines, etc. We’re active in Belgium, The Netherlands, France and Germany. We’re constantly investing in innovative technologies that stimulate and strengthen the agricultural industry. mapEO is a perfect fit in this strategy.
In plant breeding, the test plots are monitored with the naked eye. We look for the presence of disease and agronomical properties. Based on these checks, we give a score to the variety, and use that to decide whether we offer it to our customers. Our major challenge is to objectify this information of the experimental fields. With mapEO we can use drone data to monitor and evaluate the growth, health and evolution of new seed varieties.
mapEO for faster and objective screening
Instead of walking through all the experimental fields to check the plant characteristics, mapEO allows us to conduct our own drone flights or order a mapEO certified pilot to collect necessary data at set times using various cameras. As a result, we have an archive of images of all test plots.
And the winner is ...
The collaboration fits perfectly in AVEVE’s innovation strategy. Innovation is one of our core values and it is essential to provide the products and services our farmers need to be prepared for the agriculture of tomorrow and help them to improve their efficiency and turnover today.
We’ve been using mapEO since November 2017 and we already see positive results. We will compare the drone based scoring with the interactive ones and then decide how mapEO can help us even better in the future.
Discover what mapEO can do for you at mapeo.vito.be.
