Nowadays, potatoes, maize and other crops are planted in extensive fields so that agricultural machinery can work the land - even in locations where crops do not have optimal growing conditions. In such cases, fertilisers and pesticides are usually used to compensate for the disadvantage and achieve good yields. However, this common cultivation method is increasingly reaching its limits. An alternative could be the concept of spot farming.

Spot farming - a concept for the future

‘The aim of spot farming is to cultivate different plants where they have the best growing conditions. This makes them more resilient, higher-yielding and protects our environment,’ explains Jens Wegener from the Julius Kühn Institute, who helped develop the spot farming method. With this method, plants are not cultivated according to the power of the agricultural machinery, as was previously the case. Instead, the technology has to adapt to the crop cultivation. The principle: parts of the field are planted differently. To cultivate the small areas - the so-called spots - small machines and robots are also required.

This cultivation method is still just an idea and is not yet being used in practice. In the ‘Future Lab Agriculture’ (ZLA) project, researchers from IGB and partners have now scrutinised this concept more closely. In addition to IGB, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, the Georg August University of Göttingen, the Technical University of Braunschweig, the Thünen Institute and the University of Vechta are involved in the project. The project is being funded by the state with 3.7 million euros as part of the Centre for Digital Innovations Lower Saxony (ZDIN).

On the way to implementation

‘At the ZLA, we have made significant progress towards the realisation of spot farming,’ reports Jens Wegener. Among other things, researchers at the IGB developed an agronomic method to identify the different growing conditions of the spots in a field. Freely accessible geodata was used for this. On this basis, a tool was developed together with the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), which can be used to automatically create field maps with spots that can be cultivated with robots. Researchers at TU Braunschweig in turn constructed the physical prototype of a universal sowing machine, which places the seeds in the soil at ideal distances for the plants to grow and is attached to a robot.