Design & Entrepreneurship.
The farming industry has a technology acceptance problem. The amazing technological innovation is disconnected from the end users, farmers. Cultive provides water moisture sensing technology that was developed with farmers, for farmers. It won a pitch to ARM holdings at the Global Grad Show and was funded by the Douglas Bomford Trust.
The problem.
Climate change is making weather more extreme and uncertain. Water sensitive crops are being effected most. For farmers of these crops, water bills doubled from 2005 - 2011 and have kept rising since. Further to this, well managed water can greatly increase crop yield. Most technologies in development to help farmers manage their water all seem to ignore the major stakeholder: the farmer. As an example, at the Farming Technology Expo in Birmingham, there was a technology on display that could sense water moisture from satellites, but they could only take measurements 1-2 times per month. Farmers need this information daily. They are missing a user-centered design, which Cultive aimed to solve.
The process.
I led the physical product development for this project. This meant many quick design loops to balance function and form. This meant quick design sketching, which were then translated into CAD and then tested. This loop was complete 5 times over the course of 2 months, eventually settling on a rugged visual design that housed all of the required sensing, power and communication electronics.
The solution.
The Cultive platform combines on-field sensing via an IOT network and an intuitive app to help farmers inform their irrigation decisions rather than giving them instructions. It uses machine learning to help predict future soil moisture conditions by combining this on field data and future weather data.
