Automated crop scouting vs manual crop scouting… what really changes?

At a glance:

A skilled scout can walk one to two hectares a day, which puts a hard limit on how much of the site they see in any given week. Automated scouting does away with that limit, and can feasibly check every plant every night, flagging pre-symptomatic stress, so your team spends their hours acting rather than walking.

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On a ten-hectare site, a full crop walk takes about a week. By the time a scout reaches the last row, the first one is seven days out of date, and any issues that started during that time could have had a full week to get going unchecked.

The only answer is to monitor the crop more frequently. But that, unfortunately, means more scouts and increased costs. But what if you can find a scout you don’t have to pay? Someone who can handle the crop walking so your team can focus on intervention. 

Fotenix Automated Crop Scout does just that. It’s pretty nifty, and can get around your site either mounted to our trolley or existing hardware, so there’s no need for additional fixed infrastructure. It’s not intended to replace people, but it is designed to image every plant every night and take the hard yards (pardon the pun) out of crop scouting and free up skilled folk to focus their time where it matters most.

The system uses multispectral imaging to capture pictures of each plant across multiple wavelengths of light, picking up changes in plant condition that fall outside the visible spectrum. The result is a complete view of plant health and early alerts to stress, pests, and disease that your team can then act on.

A different approach

	Manual Scouting	Automated Scouting
Plants assessed	Sampled across the block	Every plant nightly
Detection point	Visible symptoms when walked	Presymptomatic within 24 hours
Recording	Submitted manually	Generated from each pass
Consistency	Varies by scout and by day	Same measurement every time
Output	Observations and a judgement	Identifies issue and location

Reducing the cost of intervention

Crop stress starts days before symptoms appear, so manually detecting it has its limitations. Automating the pass with Fotenix cuts time to detection by up to 80%, which means issues are generally contained when they’re first discovered, and interventions are reduced.

The cost of treating a few rows is also a lot cheaper than treating once an issue has spread compartment-wide. A Two Spotted Spider Mite (TSSM) infection caught in the first few days while still localised can cost as little as 10% of the investment needed to treat a compartment-wide infection.

Where does this leave human scouts?

We love an automated solution, but technology and robots aren’t a silver bullet. There are still a lot of tasks that are uniquely human, and which we’ll always do best.

Our automated crop scouting system will alert to issues and where they are, but we still need scouts to double-check the location, decide what to do, and administer and monitor the intervention. In a fully automated world, human scouts handle the strategy and intervention, and automated scouts handle the crop walks.

Machines doing the work that takes the most hours for the least skill is a good solution for an industry that’s struggling to hire. Vacancy rates of 10–20% are now common across UK greenhouse operations, and nearly 40% of growers surveyed by the government in 2022 said they'd lost crop because they couldn't get the labour they needed to manage operations.

Real results from automated scouting

The labour efficiency delivered by the Fotenix automated crop scout helped GrowUp Farms to halve the number of manual hours going into quality control, without changing the size of their team. It also meant every leaf on the production outlet was traceable by bench.

"You can't inspect every leaf by hand. At scale, it just isn't feasible." Rhydian Beynon-Davies, Head of Crop Optimisation, GrowUp Farms

Ava Berries, formerly Angus Soft Fruits, experienced a fivefold improvement in labour efficiency at their breeding site, with trait categorisation running reliably round the clock.

So, what actually changes with automated crop scouting?

A week-long crop walk no longer limits how fast you can respond. Your scouts start the day altered to the rows that need them, and the hours that used to go into finding problems go into sorting them.

But the gains don’t stop at labour efficiency. Work out what late detection is costing your site, and what you could save with automated crop scouting.

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