Sometimes there can be amazing stories right under your nose and occasionally our work with our drone cameras can bring them to light. When we were asked to film at Barfoots Farms for the BBC One Show, I’m ashamed to say we had not ever come across them before. So of course we turned to our friend the internet to let us find out more about the story.
What we discovered was that there is a chap called Peter Barfoot who has really changed our lives in terms of what we serve up onto our dinner table through his work on his farms across the south east and a lot of folk have never heard of him. Courgettes and sweetcorn are considered everyday type of vegetables now but this certainly wasn’t the case until the mid 70’s and Barfoot Farms are the folk that we have to thank for this in large part (as well as for tenderstem broccoli, pumpkins, sweet potatoes and a whole lot more). When Brits started to travel abroad and get an appetite for ‘foreign fruits and vegetables’, Peter saw an opportunity to grow and supply this semi exotic fare here in the UK and so it began, growing to an empire with more than 200 staff today keeping us fed with all the veg that we love. So there we go, I’ll feel differently about my dinner plate now I know a little more about what it took to get it there.
So I’ll spend the day down at Sefter’s Farm down near Bognor Regis, providing aerial cinematography to complement the finished piece and I can’t wait to find out more about the whole story during filming.
You can learn more about Barfoots Farms on thei website hire: www.barfoots.com
Standoff Distance in Aerial Inspection: Optical Reach Versus Getting Close
The instinct on an inspection is to move in close. On most sites that is the least useful thing the pilot can do, because proximity puts the platform among the hazards and changes the surface being measured. Standoff inverts the trade, letting the optics close the gap instead. This piece sets out what standoff buys on a working site, what actually governs the working distance, and where the limits sit, including why a thermal measurement is never a zoomed view.
Why Wet Roof Insulation Shows Up on a Thermal Image
A flat roof is a layered build-up, and only the membrane is designed to keep water out. Once water gets past it, the insulation holds it, and wet insulation gives up its heat far more slowly than dry insulation does. That difference in cooling rate is what a thermal survey records. Because water tracks sideways once it is inside the build-up, the leak, the wet area and the stain below are rarely in the same place.
A Thermal Image Is Not a Measurement: What Turns a Picture Into Evidence
A thermal camera renders apparent temperature. Turning that into a defensible figure needs the surface emissivity, the reflected apparent temperature of the surroundings and the atmospheric path between camera and target, all set correctly at capture and none of them recoverable afterwards. This piece explains why a false-colour palette is a presentation choice rather than data, how automatic scaling can make a trivial difference look alarming, and why a comparison inside one image is sturdier than either reading alone.
