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
Visual, Electrical or Thermal? What a Solar Panel Inspection Actually Comprises
Ask three companies for a solar panel inspection and you can receive three different pieces of work, all correctly described by that word. A visual inspection, string-level electrical testing and a thermographic survey answer three separate questions, and IEC 62446-1:2016 keeps inspection and testing in different clauses for exactly that reason. This article sets out what each technique comprises, what each one cannot reach, how the three relate, and how to word an enquiry so it returns the answer you actually needed.
Cell, Module, String, Array: How a Solar Installation Is Actually Wired
A solar installation is a four-level hierarchy: cell, sub-string, module and string within the array. A thermal camera records surface temperature across a flat plane, but the fault sits somewhere in that electrical structure, and interpretation is the work of deciding which level a warm area belongs to. This piece explains how photovoltaic installations are wired, why bypass diodes divide a module into blocks, and why the as-built string layout is as much a survey document as the imagery.
Why the Detail in an Aerial Survey Is Decided Before Take-Off
Most survey enquiries ask for high resolution without saying what the result has to do. Detail in a photogrammetric survey is not a setting applied in processing, it is a consequence of how high the aircraft flew and how much each photograph overlapped its neighbours. Both are fixed before take-off and neither can be improved afterwards. This piece explains what those two decisions control, what they cost in flying time, and why the useful thing to bring to a scoping conversation is an intention rather than a number.
