Agriculture students at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) have been given access to online precision farming platform, KORE, which allows them to map variation in crops using satellite data.
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, enabling 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, with the hope it will become an integral piece of teaching in the future, and be made 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 logins 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.”
