Agriculture students learn KORE skills

Agriculture students at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) have been given access to an online precision farming platform which allows them to map variation in crops using satellite data.

Data management is now a key part of crop management and KORE, which was developed by precision farming company SoilEssentials, is a platform of online tools where data from multiple sources is accessed, viewed and analysed to help farmers manage and make decisions about their land, fields and crops.

It enables them to create maps of soil characteristics, yield, plant counts and canopy development, and this information can then be linked to the weather.

The platform can also house drone imagery of crops, which can be linked with the other information.

Jim Wilson, Managing Director of SoilEssentials and alumnus of SRUC, offered students access to KORE as a learning tool. Lecturers have starting using it with fourth-year Agriculture students as part of the Advanced Agronomy and Agriculture Precision Technology courses to teach the principles of precision agriculture. However, they hope it will become an integral piece of teaching in the future, available to all Agriculture students.

Alex Hilton, a lecturer in SRUC’s North Faculty, said: “This project came about when Jim suggested that students could have access to the KORE platform as a teaching tool. It was an opportunity we could not refuse and so over the summer we had a series of meetings to make this happen.
“SoilEssentials also provided some of the staff with training which was vital to be able to deliver our classes. All fourth-year Agriculture students have log-ins so they can look at different fields on our farms, look at the variability and explore what options exist to change this. Some of our students are now interested in using this platform for their honours projects.”

Jim Wilson said giving students opportunities to explore new precision farming tools allows them to expand their knowledge and understanding and gets them thinking about the applications that it can be used for, now and in the future.
He said: “An understanding of the uses and concepts of precision agriculture has become one of the key skills needed by students to allow them to work in agriculture and its associated industries. Using KORE will help students understand these uses and concepts and give them hands-on experience in the fields and crops that they already know, while using satellite and drone imagery, mobile applications, soil sampling and creating variable rate application maps.”

SAC Consulting, part of SRUC, is also working in collaboration with SoilEssentials to develop a platform for its crop advisory services.