AgriTech – The Missing Link

Words by Shauna Crewes and SatApps Catapult team

Our world is changing, and agricultural impacts have a large part to play in its decline. In the UK, intensive food production has caused arable soils to lose 40 – 60% of their organic carbon, has removed the food sources and home for our birds, reducing their numbers to less than half of those in 1970, and is responsible for 11% of greenhouse gas emissions. Something needs to be done to slow down, if not stop, the decline of our wildlife, soil health, waterways and climate.

The Environmental Space Living Lab (ESLL) is a project with a regional focus that could lead to a national, potentially global, impact. Working in partnership with SatAppsCatapult, and a host of wider industry partners, researchers at the University of Plymouth aim to unlock the potential of satellite technology for sustainable land and resource management.

Through collaboration of tech experts, policy makers and land users, we aim to accelerate the commercialisation of satellite technology to bring about long-term social and environmental change.

Starting locally, the Environmental Space Living Lab plans to enable change by addressing three key problems:

insufficient collaboration among agricultural stakeholders for better environmental management
limited awareness and support for farmers’ adoption of agriculture and automation technologies
a growing agricultural skills shortage in the region.

Robotic Traction Unit mapping a lavender field

ELLIE the Robot Dog in lavender patch

The project aims to provide the missing link of communication and understanding between the two parties. The knowledge ESLL has of both sides enables the agricultural sector across Devon and Somerset to better adapt to the UK’s ongoing agriculture transition plan towards sustainable environment outcomes. The approach of ESLL will be to encourage a more connected method of working to co-create transformative solutions to the environmental challenges faced by those working on the land using satellite technology. With these relationships established, ESLL want to help tackle four key focus challenges:

Soil health

Current situation:

healthy soils are essential to national food security, clean water provisioning, and carbon sequestration
eroded soils put buildings and infrastructure at risk from landslips and subsidence

plant biodiversity depends heavily on soil conditions, and in turn supports high animal biodiversity
soil health needs to be monitored over enormous areas to inform biodiversity work, farming, construction, and climate mitigation efforts.

Satellite technology support

Remote sensing technology enables soil monitoring at scale and geospatial analysis approaches help visualise and analyse soil data:

monitor surface soil carbon levels
collate natural capital information across multiple sites to analyse their contribution to ecosystem services
monitor building movement to analyse subsidence risks
sample a remote site’s soil conditions using automated and digital connectivity solutions.

Biodiversity decline

Current situation:

global biodiversity decline, exacerbated by climate change, is resulting the unconscionable loss of species at an alarming rate

halting biodiversity loss is key, but knowledge is rapidly needed across huge geographic areas with high-spatial resolution
monitoring biodiversity must be faster, at bigger scales, and better, which requires new technology solutions.

Satellite technology support

Satellite technology, connectivity, climate modelling technologies and geospatial intelligence enable improving biodiversity conditions:

track species movements and migrations
predict where species will be able to live under future conditions
enable conservation workers to bring tech into the wild to maximise efficiency and safe working
planning space for nature and ensuring that species have adequate environmental corridors within the landscape to disperse.

Water quality

Current situation:

understanding the characteristics of catchments and their proximity to natural or built-up areas is key to managing their complexity
when catchments are poorly managed the environment is less able to clean water, refill aquifers, and reduce flood impacts, increasing costs.

water companies need to prepare water for consumption and preventing sewage from contaminating the environment
companies manage the supply and flow of water to minimise the impact of droughts or the risks of flooding.

Satellite technology support

Satellite monitoring, remote sensing and geospatial approaches are needed to manage hydrological systems due to their large size and their dependence on the spatial positioning of key features:

geospatial planning is essential for managing water flows
track changes in a river’s course that may impact buildings
mapping of invasive river species can be essential for disease and pest control solutions
monitor for signs of water contamination, helping detect and minimise environmental impacts.

Automation usage

Current situation:

UK farmers benefit from autonomous technology that can free up their time and mitigate shortfalls in workforce and economic pressures

robotics that can perform demanding, delicate, repetitious work in field conditions are changing how crops are managed and harvested
automated sampling technology can scale up experimental data collection, site mapping, and protected species detection
samples of eDNA from water and soils, or environmental features can be used to monitor species activity without relying on surveyor time and expertise.

Satellite technology support

connected sensors placed across farms assist in automating data collection and real-time decision making for precision agriculture
satellite imagery can complement data from sensors to provide advanced warning to farmers of crop, soil, and weather conditions
automated robotics in terrestrial or aquatic environments can enable 24/7 monitoring or sampling of sites with high regularity of data collection
Earth Observation technology can generate highly accurate spatial mapping of natural capital and ecosystem services.

The ESLL project wants to tackle these challenges in four ways:

Through opportunity exploration by conducting a range of activities including market research, user research and stakeholder requirement gathering, all of which offer us the opportunity to understand exactly what is needed to solve the challenge in question. We would then define the challenge, conducting various activities to identify key areas of opportunity, such as eco-system mapping. Throughout all of this work, the project will encourage users and developers to take a deep dive in their business plans, highlighting the opportunities and risks involved in bringing a new solution to market.
Through solution acceleration and testing the project aims to co-design and prototype solutions and thinking, where we will support concept generation, idea development and prototype creation. From here we will test and trial solutions, increasing the confidence and usability of the idea or product. And we will evaluate and learn from these trials, helping to understand if and how to scale the solution as well as which solutions to stop developing.

The project will help users with commercialisation support, developing a commercialisation strategy and deploying the solution at scale with the full support of a business strategy team. You will receive help with business plan refinement, bid writing and ethics and governance as well as other key activities.
Most importantly, the project will help to tackle change and develop solutions through community and networking. Allowing you to understand the wider market, share best practise and encourage the ‘art of the possible’. Through virtual and in-person events you will be able to showcase your solutions, access the Living Labs community to find partners, clients and investors and connect with like-minded innovators, stakeholders and solution providers.

To register your interest in this exciting opportunity to tackle global change, email businessengagement@sa.catapult.org.uk and become part of the space innovation movement!