Returning this year is the Young Engineer Award. Like last year, the award will be aiming to champion an individual or collective of young engineers who have created or worked on a piece of agricultural machinery, equipment or technology which significantly improves efficiency, profitability or sustainability on-farm.
Sponsored by:
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The product 'Sprout' is a lightweight, battery-powered, multipurpose field robot. The initial tool being developed is a selective harvester for green asparagus.
The robot platform that can be deployed in a variety of crops to carry out labour-intensive tasks such as harvesting and mechanical weeding in a sustainable way. Compared with people, the robots are cheaper and work more accurately, improving yield. Being lightweight and battery-powered reduces soil compaction and allows a transition to renewable energy.
Growers can maintain or even expand the production of nutritious vegetable crops to meet the increasing domestic demand. This safeguards the survival of domestic high-value agriculture and builds food system resilience for the nation.
The product is a ride on cubicle cleaner used to clean cow cubicles in the dairy industry.
It can clean and rebed 200 cubicles in 5 minutes whilst also scraping slats compared to taking an hour to do so manually. This is often done twice a day so there can a time saving of almost 2 hours per day on a 200 cow dairy farm. It also saves on bedding materials by cleaning more effectively than manual methods and then spreading materials evenly.
The inspiration came from an uncle that is a dairy farmer. He did the heavy chore of brushing down cubicles every morning and every evening when the dairy herd is housed. He then had to carry sawdust and lime to the cubicles to bed them. This was then followed by manually scraping the slats with a hand scraper. Over the years this took its toll on him and he had to get a hip replacement. He spoke with me about automatic scrapers for the slats but that only solved part of the problem so I designed and built a machine to do the 3 chores in one go!
Suppling Heat and Hot Water to the Farm resident and buildings, resulting in a reduced manual handling and loading biomass.
The Air Source Heat Pumps can be 500% efficient compared to conventional heating methods, by using this method to pre heat the main water cylinder supplying the farm buildings, less energy is used and also less raw materials.
This system would be ideal for anyone who currently uses a biomass boiler system to heat their farm buildings. By eliminating the need to spend on raw materials, fill or load or to pre heat to cut bills, this system would be ideal. The system could also help cut cost for those nearing the end of the RHI for their Biomass, where the savings could become less.
Why DF Capital has sponsored the LAMMA Young Engineer Award?
We are delighted to sponsor the LAMMA Young Engineer Award, which recognises individuals who are pushing the boundaries of modern engineering and creating genuinely new economic opportunities, benefitting farms and the environment in the process. Sustainability is a key part of DF Capital’s ethos, so it is a privilege to be involved with this initiative. As a long-time supporter of the next generation of talent in a workplace, we applaud the innovative thinking, hard work and skills of the young engineers who enter this award. They are fantastic role models for any young person considering joining the engineering or farming profession.
About DF CapitalDF Capital is a specialist savings and commercial lending bank, built to serve the needs of businesses and individuals in the UK. We provide award-winning inventory finance solutions to agricultural equipment dealer and manufacturing businesses across the country.
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