Twenty four blocks, a field team of four, and a rotation that had not changed in years. Anything between scheduled walks depended on a harvester mentioning it.
“Four of us walking blocks and we still only got round everything once a month. By the time you see something yourself it has usually been going a while.”
What happened
In the second week of the wet season the platform flagged a seventeen year old block that was not on anyone’s list. NDRE had dropped across three passes while the blocks either side held steady. Because the stand is past year six the system had already stopped relying on NDVI, which would have shown all three blocks flat near the top of the range. A scout walked it the next morning and found early Ganoderma on nine palms in one corner, none of them visible from the road. The next scheduled inspection for that block was five weeks away.
What did not work
“The first month we chased a few things that turned out to be cloud. We got better at reading which alerts to take seriously, and it got better at telling us.”
What they would tell a peer
“It has not replaced walking the blocks. It tells us which ones to walk first, and that is most of the value.”
