Podcasts are awesome. Robots too. This episode from Steve Levitt’s podcast People I (Mostly) Admire entitled “Can Robots Get A Grip?” was the catalyst for this post: Can Robots Get a Grip? – Freakonomics. The podcast is mainly about the work of Prof. Ken Goldberg at U.C. Berkeley in training robots to grasp things. This…
Read more
If plant blindness is a thing, then it seems reasonable that root blindness is also a thing. If we don’t notice plants as much as we do animals because said plants don’t move and capture our attention, then the root systems of these plants are even more invisible. ROOT SYSTEMS AND DIGITALISATION OF AGRICULTURE Another…
Read more
If this is the definition of “Precision agriculture”, then I think that basically all agricultural researchers are working on this. I mean, no one is trying to work out what is the wrong product, or wrong place, or wrong time. Well, maybe some, but even then it is so it can ultimately be “right, right,…
Read more
16 months ago, I needed a growth model that could handle running simulations of the sugar beet crop. The STICS model, developed in France, had successfully been used in a project that included millions of simulations in the sugar beet crop: the Previbest project, presented at the 79th IIRB congress (IIRB2024), by Thomas Leborgne. The…
Read more
No, the photo is not a bad photoshop. That is just how it came out. During the 2025 cropping season, soil moisture sensors were installed as part of projects looking at digital tools for use in precision agriculture. One of the units was a set of three water mark tensiometer type sensors connected to a…
Read more
This post describes my work in the field of the digitalisation of agriculture, as of August 2025. Mer = “more” in Swedish, so this is a post with more information, or an update, about me and my work within Digitalisation of Agriculture. Self indulgent, quite. But the purpose of this post is to describe (mainly…
Read more
From the start of 2025, I have a new job. Some things will change a lot: my employer, the percentage of sugar beet in my work. Some things won’t change at all: still 100% research, still 100% agriculture, still in the same corridor at Gula Huset in Borgeby. The role is as a Project Manager…
Read more
2024 done and dusted. And I don’t have a single photo from harvest: Christian fixed the harvest, GDL fixed the delivery, and I was busy fixing trial data. Any photos on this post are old ones. Harvest date was 6 November. Delivery date was, in the end 13 and 14 November. There was a lot…
Read more
14 August 2024. Sow +118 days. INSECTS Formal monitoring has ended. With the worst insect threat behind us, it can be said that 2024 was an OK year. Beet fly / miner came early and has hung around, but the pressure has not been problematic. Black bean aphids came and went without meeting spraying thresholds.…
Read more
3 July 2024. Sow +76 days. A lot has been happening… CROP DEVELOPMENT AND CONDITIONS The crop is looking good (see page feature image). It varies over the field, but I’d say there is around 80% canopy coverage and some of the roots are starting to reach 300-400g weight. There are still a lot of…
Read more