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The Awards, which included a ‘Machinery’ and an ‘Arable’ category, were created by Ipswich-based farming magazine Farmers Guide to specifically highlight excellence within the industry during 2015; and were presented to Adama UK for its WaterAware App and Vaderstad for its SeedEye automated seed calibration system.

Speaking at the event, Farmers Guide arable editor, Dominic Kilburn presented the Arable category award to Adama marketing manager Alison Bosher for the company’s WaterAware App – a device to help farmers, agronomists and sprayer operators prevent key pesticides entering and polluting water supplies.

Designed as a decision support tool, and developed by Farming Online, the App alerts the user to the potential risk of pollution due to the current and forecast weather and soil conditions and provides operators with a simple ‘Yes/No’ guide with regard to the timing of an application.

Dominic said that he had been impressed with the company’s WaterAware initiative, first launched in 2014, and that the WaterAware App was the “icing on the cake” for an initiative designed to support sustainable crop protection solutions which are coming under increasing pressure from the Water Framework Directive.

“The WaterAware App, in my mind, is a further example of Adama’s broader commitment to product stewardship and promoting the responsible use of current chemistry,” he commented. “And, if it can play even a small part in an overall strategy in reducing exceedances of pesticides in water, and helps maintain key OSR herbicides such as metazachlor, carbetamide and propyzamide in the farmer’s crop protection armoury now, and in the future, then it will have been a success.”

Also speaking at the event, and presenting the award to Vaderstad UK managing director Michael Alsop, was Farmers Guide machinery editor David Williams. He said that the SeedEye, which is planned to be commercially available to UK growers in March, would save farmers considerable time and effort when it came to establishing crops in future.

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“Even then, different seed batches and weather conditions can affect seed flow through the drill,” pointed out David.

However, Vaderstad’s SeedEye, he said, removes the need for the weighing and calibration process. Instead, using infrared technology, it counts every seed passing through each seed tube, so that the drill metering system achieves the desired plant population, while compensating automatically for factors such as uneven ground, the weather and variable seed size.

Also, because it self adjusts, the SeedEye can easily achieve variable rate seeding to optimise for field conditions when working with soil maps, continued David.

“The SeedEye has huge potential; it’s simple to operate, it can greatly improve the accuracy of seed placement compared with traditional drill systems, it will optimise crop development and save operators a lot of time. It’s a worthy winner of the inaugural Farmers Guide Awards for Excellence,” he concluded.