Agriculture · Aquaculture · Open science

Agriculture and aquaculture technology, reviewed against the evidence

Sensors, monitoring, closed systems and controlled-environment growing - assessed on what the published trials actually support. Where the evidence is thin, this site says so rather than rounding it up into confidence.

Start with smart farming How to check a claim yourself

Sections

Five areas, each built around the decisions a grower or producer actually faces.

Smart Farming

Soil sensors, weather stations, drones and farm management software - assessed by what they change in the field, not by what the brochure promises.

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Aquaculture

Water quality monitoring, recirculating systems, aeration and automated feeding - the equipment layer that decides whether a fish farm runs at its biological potential or well below it.

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Aquaponics

Coupled fish-and-plant systems, the water chemistry that decides whether they work, and an honest account of where straightforward hydroponics beats aquaponics.

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Greenhouse

Climate control, screens, ventilation and vertical systems - what the equipment does, and the energy arithmetic that decides whether the crop pays for the building.

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Open Science

Agricultural and aquaculture research is unusually open - if you know where it sits. The repositories, the search routes and the metadata standards that make them work.

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Journal

Longer analysis pieces on where agricultural technology is going, what the published evidence supports, and which claims do not survive contact with a field.

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What this site does differently

Traceable

Claims point at sources

A percentage improvement with no control group, no location and no sample size is decoration, not evidence. Where a number appears here, the route to checking it is described.

Bounded

Limits stated, not buried

Every technology here has situations where it does not pay. Those are set out alongside the ones where it does, because that is the part that decides a purchase.

Open

The literature is free

Most agricultural research is publicly funded and openly readable. Knowing where it sits turns a marketing claim into something you can verify in twenty minutes.

Where people usually start

Soil moisture sensors

The cheapest reliable win in precision agriculture - if the sensor is the right type, buried in the right place, and read by someone who acts on it.

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Water quality monitoring

Dissolved oxygen, ammonia, pH and temperature - what to measure continuously, what to measure by hand, and how to build an alarm chain that survives the power cut that causes the problem.

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Recirculating systems (RAS)

Closed systems buy control over temperature, biosecurity and location, and pay for it with capital, energy and a much lower tolerance for operator error.

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Starter systems

Media bed, deep water culture or nutrient film - the choice determines how forgiving the system is when something goes wrong, which matters more than yield at the start.

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Climate control

Greenhouse control is transpiration control. Once that is the goal rather than temperature or humidity alone, most of the counter-intuitive equipment behaviour makes sense.

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Finding research

Checking whether a claim about yield, water saving or stocking density holds up usually takes twenty minutes. Here is the sequence that works.

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From the journal

All articles

Reading agritech yield claims

A percentage improvement with no control group, no location and no sample size is not a result. Here is what to ask instead.

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Why losses happen at dawn

The most predictable hazard in pond aquaculture kills stock on a schedule. The defences are well understood and routinely under-specified.

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The vertical farming lesson

The plants grew fine. That is the whole point, and the reason the lesson generalises well beyond vertical farming.

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Equipment comparisons

Partner programmes for the equipment categories covered here are not yet in place, so no product links are shown anywhere on this site. The comparisons in each guide are editorial and organised by equipment class rather than by brand. When retailer links are added they will be marked, and the reasoning in the guides will not change to accommodate them.

How VOA3R is funded