CropCount

CropCount is a practical way for farmers to tally their crop accurately.

To forecast a harvest, you need to know how much fruit you have on your trees. And when you have hundreds or thousands of trees, it's a big job; one that farmers get right about half the time.

Using complicated, sciencey stuff like generating normalised difference vegetation indexes of crops using multispectral satellites to create forecasting models. Farmer's can turn a gut feeling into a 97% accurate forecast.

The initial project phase focused on bringing an MVP to the industry body to measure its performance and viability. To make sure we developed the features that would create the most impact for farmers. We ran a design sprint to unearth insights and rapidly prototype designs to test with growers. The sprint dovetailed into an agile production workflow, with design and engineering working in tandem to create the product branding, interface and platform architecture.

The web portal allows farm managers to view past forecasts and see how the current one is progressing. They're able to drill down into any farm section to view data on estimated block yields or where the unhealthiest trees are.

The mobile collection app combines high resolution, multispectral satellite imagery and GPS to help farmers find carefully selected trees and collect accurate fruit numbers and tree health data.

We worked with farmers as closely as we did scientists, rigorously testing early prototypes to work out the best fit for their farm management practices.

We also had to consider device and connectivity, which is a prevalent issue in the field. It meant building an app that worked effectively offline with the ability to sync when users were back online.

“For a couple of backpackers who have never looked at it, they could pick it up straight away. That's a good sign.” Matt, Blue Sky Produce