To help growers meet the challenges of rising costs, changes to farm support, and increasingly extreme weather events, leading crop production firm Hutchinsons has been at the forefront of investing heavily in developing services and technologies that have been tested at a farm scale level across its national network of Helix farms.

Visitors to the Hutchinsons stand at Croptec will have the opportunity to find out how these services and technologies can help to build more resilient farming systems that harness natural processes and reduce the need for artificial inputs.

Have questions around Agroecology? Hutchinsons are leading the way in trialling and testing agroecological farming practices on a farm scale level through the Helix Agroecology farm. A year into the project, there are many learnings about how these may be adopted onto your farm in a practical but also profitable and sustainable way.

Need to know more about your soils? Soil health is widely recognised as a cornerstone of sustainable farming systems. However, it is key to understand your soil before making any significant structural or operational changes.

Hutchinsons soil scanning system, TerraMap provides the most accurate and repeatable soil mapping available. Now this can be aligned with the most comprehensive soil analysis to give an unrivalled soil nutritional and management service, TerraMap Gold.

How can your farm data be used more profitably?

The Omnia Digital Farming platform has continued to evolve and develop offering a range of innovative new developments using farm data, such as Cost of Production and Yield Performance mapping, Terramap, Carbon mapping, and E-Seed.

The most recent of these is the Business Performance planning module which uses this data to cost out a range of potential cropping and machinery scenario's in terms of both financial and CO₂ equivalent performance.

Omnia also now provides a management platform to complete all of the SFI Soil standard requirements in a functional and easy way, allowing you to improve your soil health and gain your SFI Soils Standard payment.

To ensure it remains up-to-date as scheme requirements change, further updates are already planned to accommodate the wider release of other SFI measures in the future, such as the Advanced Standard due in 2024.