Infrastructure Assessment
At a Glance
| Challenge | Finding faults or failures in orchard infrastructure (e.g. irrigation line blocks or leaks) is a costly and manually intensive task. Failure to identify and mitigate these failures has the potential to incur significant costs as well as potential productive crop loss. |
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| Solution | Green Atlas Cartographer is able to detect the visual symptoms of many types of orchard infrastructure failures using its high resolution on-board cameras and powerful onboard lighting system. |
| Result | A rapid, objective assessment of infrastructure faults or failures within an orchard and geolocated maps to pinpoint their locations, maximising available human resource utilisation, minimising time to detection and minimising potential downsides of unremediated failures. |
Delayed Reaction to Hidden Failures
Routine scouting is expensive and error-prone, for unknown reward.
Orchard infrastructure is vast, often spanning hundreds of kilometers of poly-pipe, emitters/sprinklers, posts, poles and wires. Finding faults manually is incredibly time consuming, often involving near constant scouting missions by orchard staff.
- The Invisible Threat: Infrastructure failures such as a clogged drip line or a broken valve aren't always obvious to an operator driving past on an orchard-wide scouting mission.
- The Cost of Delayed Detection: By the time an infrastructure failure becomes obvious through traditional manual scouting, particularly an irrigation failure, affected trees may have already suffered severe water stress, leading to dropped fruit, reduced sizing, or permanent root death. Water logging of the inter-row also has the potential to hamper every day orchard operations through bogging of vehicles.
- Prohibitive Labor Costs: Having workers walk or drive every single row to check for failed or faulty infrastructure is a significant financial imposition at a commercial scale.
Visual Anomaly Mapping
Replace error-prone manual scouting with objective failure mapping.
Green Atlas Cartographer acts as an automated infrastructure auditor, using its high-speed imaging payload to identify the unmistakable biological and physical symptoms of mechanical failure.
- High Power, Shadow-Free Imaging: Using high-intensity strobe lighting and high-resolution cameras, the system mitigates shifting sunlight and shadows. This enables it to capture uniform, ultra-clear images of the orchard infrastructure at any time. The response of Irrigation water to strobe lighting highlights issues not visible to the human eye.
- Defect Tagging: When the system identifies a visual symptom of infrastructure failure, it instantly logs the exact GPS coordinate. These points are compiled into an Infrastructure Fault Map, transforming an entire orchard scan into an actionable remediation task map.
Surgical Maintenance and Asset Protection
Find and fix failures early
By moving from reactive scouting to automated, full-orchard fault detection, growers can protect their crop assets and optimise their maintenance budgets:
- Targeted Repair Workflow: Management receives an ‘infrastructure repair’ map. Instead of maintenance crews scouting rows looking for a problem, they are guided by the map straight to the exact location where the anomaly was detected, maximizing labor efficiency.
- Resource and Water Conservation: Pinpointing irrigation leaks early prevents the waste of water and liquid fertilisers, protecting the orchard's bottom line and helping operations meet strict environmental sustainability targets.
- Data-Backed Capital Decisions: Mapping recurring infrastructure faults over time provides management with clear, empirical data on which blocks have failing/ageing hardware, justifying capital investments in whole system upgrades.
Get Started
Map and resolve infrastructure failures.
Find your nearest Green Atlas service provider to discuss how to implement infrastructure failure mapping in your orchard.