This week we spoke with Martin Leahy at Maxon about the use of their mechatronic drive systems in agriculture and particularly in the growing sector of field robotics.Maxon is a global manufacturing company that specialises in designing DC drives, gearheads and controllers. Their equipment is used everywhere, even on Mars - with over 100 drives on the red planet including the latest Perseverance rover and its companion helicopter. So they are known for reliability and the ability to function in adverse conditions!

We spoke with Jose Chitty of SmartBell to update us on the successes of the WELL-CALF project and the exciting next steps for the team. Funded by Innovate UK, the WELL-CALF project works to develop the first precision agriculture integrated monitoring system that was specifically designed for early disease detection or developing health issues in calves from seven days old to sixteen weeks old. The project makes optimising treatment and management practices at an individual animal level a simple and accessible reality for dairy and beef farmers. 

Agri-EPI's Duncan Ross speaks with Paul Baranowski at Climate Edge who are on a mission to help agricultural organisations turn their expertise into interactive services that farmers use - with a focus on emerging market smallholder farmers.They discuss the challenges of face to face support and advice for small farmers and how digital communication can revolutionise this. The importance of considering accessibility, engagement, learning and iteration when working with these farmers.

Agri-EPI Centre's Data and Automation Lead Eliot Dixon spoke with Christopher Woodrow, Camera Test Expert and Test Team Lead at Continental Engineering Systems to discuss the use of their vision equipment and experience in computer vision in automotive for automation and other use cases in agri-tech.

This week AgriEPI's Tom Slattery spoke with Synne Foss Budal of NoFence about their virtual fencing solution, why they chose the UK as a market, what farmers are adopting NoFence, how it's improving life for livestock farmers, the wider future for livestock tech, the importance of considering farmer needs and engagement, as well as some positive customer experiences and what they have to say to the sceptics out there.https://www.nofence.no/en

In this weeks episode, we spoke with Graham Spencley of Gill Jenning & Evering about the state of Intellectual Property in Agri-Tech.

Agri-EPI Centre's Operational Manager Les Hurdiss spoke with Sam Clayton, Founder and Chief People Finder at Agrecruit to hear more about the boom in tech recruitment into the agriculture sector and where the biggest opportunities lie.  Their search and selection services help agricultural innovators and game-changers, from start-ups to multinationals, secure the best and brightest candidates in digital and conventional agriculture, for technical, leadership and commercial roles. "AgRecruit helped us to fill a very senior and pivotal role in our company and our experience with them was excellent. They quickly understood our requirements and provided very high quality candidates in a matter of days." - Terraprima Group  "AgRecruit have been an important partner in our growth as a business, seeking out deep and relevant experience from other industries and bringing these into the agrifood sector so we can keep expanding our software engineering, data engineering, data science and product teams." - Agrimetrics  "We’ve been faced with the challenge of having to hire skilled people fast for a tricky location. Sam and AgRecruit have been able to help us find and secure great people across a variety of disciplines, including Software Development, Computer Vision, Electronics Engineering and Safety Systems" - Saga Robotics  "Excellent service from AgRecruit. I got the candidates I asked for and the recruitment process was managed in a thorough, timely and professional manner” - Alltech  "Every business needs an expert recruiter for key hires. We consider Sam and AgRecruit an essential part of the Earth Rover team." - Earth Rover

Agri-EPI Centre's Business Development Manager for Duncan Ross spoke with Zac Gazit, CEO & Managing Director of Alvatech about climate change and the need for cost-effective water treatment solutions.ALVÁTECH is led by a team of professionals each with over 25 years of a recognised and proven track record in agronomy, farm and water management, technology development and global distribution.We successfully operate in USA, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.Every product we develop is inspired by our main mission, which is to provide farmers, agri-associations, NGOs and governments with advanced, environmentally-friendly and highly effective water treatment solutions. In this rapidly changing world, affected by global warming, increasing population curve and food security crisis, we have realised the importance of continually updating our solutions and developing new ones so our clients and distributors are always ahead of the game.

Agri-EPI Centre's Operations Manager Les Hurdiss spoke with Florian Richter, Founder & CEO & Muddy Machines about the role of robotics on farms, how they can help solve the crisis of labour shortages and bring young talent into the sector.Muddy Machines are developing a new generation of field robots that help growers manage labour-intensive crops by conducting fieldwork. Initially, we are focused on developing selective harvesters with yield prediction.Chris and Florian met at Entrepreneur First in London in early 2020. Florian's family owns a large farm in Portugal and was looking for a technical co-founder to help bring modern technologies to agriculture. Chris shared this vision and the pair started researching problems that farmers and growers face today.Many interviews, zoom calls and online conferences later it became clear that reliable access to manual labour was a massive issue in agriculture. Furthermore, Covid-19 and Brexit were exacerbating the problem.Britain requires 80,000 migrant workers every year during harvest season. Crops that need to be selectively harvested are particularly labour intensive because you need to carefully assess each plant to see if it/it's crop is ready for harvest and most of the time you also cannot simply rip out the plant but rather have to carefully remove the bit that you want to harvest.Their machines will enable growers to grow more produce locally and ensure that the food we eat is fresher, more sustainable and resilient to future disruption in trade and labour.

Agri-EPI Centre's Business Development Manager for Duncan Ross spoke with Thomas Farrugia, Founder and CEO of Beta Bugs about the emerging role of insects as a source of sustainable protein.Beta Bugs is a cutting edge biotechnology company that produces enhanced insect strains for the growing insect farming industry.  The domesticated, optimised strains we produce provide benefits at all levels of the production chain ensuring the industry is both more profitable and sustainable.  They accelerate the evolution of the organisms to create traits that ensure greatly superior final products.​However, having only recently been domesticated, insects, unlike other agricultural species, are far from optimised for industry. There are huge improvements to be made in efficiency, quality of produce and ease of farming. Beta Bugs are changing this through the application of state of the art breeding programmes and tried and tested bio-techniques.