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
The Roof You Can Reach Is Not the Whole Roof
A roof gets inspected in the places a person could stand, and that single fact explains most of what gets found late. Ladders reach the eaves, scaffolds cover one elevation, and fragile coverings restrict a roof walk exactly where the roof is oldest. Photographing from the air removes the constraint rather than the expertise: every slope is covered square on, and the interpretation stays with your roofer or surveyor.
Domestic Solar Layout: Why the Roof Decides What Can Be Inspected
A domestic solar array is rarely laid out the way anyone would choose. Pitch and orientation are inherited from the building, and shading from chimneys, dormers and trees removes usable area before the layout is drawn. What gets installed is the residual. Those same decisions fix the plane the modules sit in, and so fix the directions from which they can usefully be imaged afterwards, which is why a rooftop array is awkward to assess from ground level.
A Home Solar Array Ages Quietly, and the Owner Is the Last to Know
A domestic solar array has no moving parts, makes no noise and sits out of sight, so nothing about a developing fault announces itself. The generation figure an owner can see is one number for the whole system, and a genuine loss can sit inside the ordinary variation of British weather. Drone Media Imaging looks at what those figures do and do not tell you, and why periodic thermographic survey examines the array itself rather than its aggregate output.
