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Mr. William Atkinson grew up in a secluded area of north east England spending his younger years either playing rugby or sitting on the harvester during the summer time.

In 2007 he came home to join the family business, at the time it was primarily made up of a cattle enterprise and a small arable enterprise. By the time he had gained a few years experience in the business and by which time his elder sibling had also joined they started to grow and diversify the business away from the intensive beef fattening enterprises to become a mixed lamb, beef and pork enterprises as well as doubling the arable enterprise. 

The arable aspect of the business is his responsibility and for which he spends 90 per cent of his time. In the early years they were very driven by the profitability of the rotation, with crops only grown on a return basis. Unfortunately this had led to hindering grass weed problem that has multiplied in recent years.

Unfortunately the weed, Blackgrass, tested as the most resistant form possible known in the UK. In an attempt to manage this burden they made a number of significant changes, the rotation and establishment method to name a couple. However, one aspect that was very clear and obvious was that the population of the weeds movement was patchey and very distinct, he saw this as an opportunity to possibly record this movement and fine tune their herbicide applications.

After spending a number of years studying a means of achieving this, he eventually settled on a UAV (drone). He spent the next two years fine tuning this program, finding the positives and battling the negatives.

After this time he managed to alter herbicide programs to his benefit saving on total spend as well as starting to turn a corner on their weed burden. Today he is still looking to fine tune this mechanism further and would like to further explore the possibilities. 

Recently William’s intervention has been well recognised within the farming community spending the last 18 months doing presentations on his findings as well as recently winning an arable innovation award.

During his Nuffield Scholarship he intends to study three main areas (Remote Sensing, Inter row management and Robotics). 

Mr. Atkinson will be visiting the Precision Agriculture Research Lab November 13 - 18th, 2017.  Welcome!