How Angus soft fruits increased labour efficiency by 400%
- Fotenix Team
- Oct 17
- 2 min read
At a glance:
When maintaining visibility over the glasshouse at its breeding site became too labour-intensive, grower Angus Soft Fruit turned to Fotenix to help automate the process, improving labour efficiency by 400%.
Angus Soft Fruits (ASF) has a reputation for producing premium berries and is the grower behind several well-known brands, among them AVATM.
The team relies on Fotenix to automate crop monitoring at its breeding site, providing early insight into plant health, disease status, and pests. It is also trialling multispectral imaging within its breeding research.
"We're excited to see where the possibilities of automated phenotyping go and understand how Fotenix can help us identify traits that are challenging to manually score.” Lucy Wilkins, Breeding Programme Director.
Why Fotenix?
ASF conducts extensive breeding research, but maintaining visibility over a full glasshouse is labour-intensive. Manually grading phenotypes like fruit quality and size can be subjective, as different staff members may assign varying grades to identical phenotypes, impacting data quality.
The grower needed a solution to help automate this data collection. In doing so, ASF hoped to increase the consistency and accuracy of its breeding data while reducing the amount of time dedicated to crop walks, helping to free staff up for other activities.
How we helped:
Fotenix installed a rolling rig at Angus Soft Fruits’ breeding site, with multispectral imaging set up to cover two rows of strawberry crops; analysing leaves, flowers, and fruits. The system was trained on manual measures from the current crop walking schedule to ensure continuity.
What was the impact?
The trial successfully provided data that formed the basis of breeding decisions, increasing the confidence in the performance of trial varieties and helping to shape future varieties.
What we delivered
x5 improvement in Labour Efficiency
Trait Categorisation
Round-the-clock Quality Assurance
