Visitors to LAMMA 2014, held on 21 and 22 January at the East of England Showground, heard how Agrovista is making bold strides into the fast-paced world of precision agriculture and associated analytics.

The company has been investing in fully integrated realtime weather, disease forecasting, precision mapping and water management systems which will culminate in a cloud-based data hub later this year. The full range of services will be housed under one roof, that of Plantsystems from Agrovista.

"Plantsystems combines all of our precision farming activities and field expertise," explains Agrovista's Nick Rainsley. "As technology develops we believe it will be essential for progressive growers to have access to this technology in an easy, integrated package; but that these services are coupled with sound in-field crop management advice."

At the heart of this service is data and good technical people, Mr Rainsley suggests. "Information collected from a grower's various systems provides a background to help with a range of in-field or in-tunnel husbandry like balancing soil nutrition, utilising variable rate applications and automated management of irrigation systems."

The precision services, which include automated soil moisture monitoring, live disease forecasting, crop nutrition mapping and telemetry solutions  are fully integrated with a team of precision farming agronomists who are all BASIS and FACTS qualified. "These agronomists are also literate in managing data in "the cloud", IT hardware and are fully trained in the other precision systems growers are likely to be using in-cab, as well as in their monitoring sites, like on-farm weather stations."

"We truly believe that our developments follow the acquisition of Plantsystems 18 months ago; their  expertise in precision agronomy and management tools coupled with further significant investment, is already bringing our grower customers towards the holy grail of a fully integrated agronomy system," says Mr Rainsley.