Abstract

With soft fruit growers facing tighter margins due to changing economic circumstances and competition from low cost imports, it is imperative that growers can maximise their yield whilst maintaining a healthy . With longer growing seasons, disease can be a real problem affecting the health of the plant whilst also limiting the potential yield further impacting the grower. This project aims to provide a tool for the grower to remotely monitor a crop from anywhere with access to the internet. Using clusters of custom designed modules consisting of low-cost computing and imaging equipment, a system has been developed to monitor a crop throughout a growing season remotely. The system was able to power itself via renewable energy while capturing images of strawberry plants, inoculated with Phytophthora cactorum, via a fully customisable schedule for data collection, which reduced the risk of pathogen contamination of other crops by removing the requirement to physically visit the crop. The self-powered remote monitoring system is scalable by adding or removing clusters and lends itself to the collection of additional sensory data also.