About Chambers Group and Salih Hodzhov

WB Chambers started growing fruit in 1952 and is now run by third generation owner Tim Chambers. It is now the largest grower of cane fruits (raspberries and blackberries) in the UK with contracts to supply all the major supermarkets chains, including year-round supply deals with Sainsburys and Aldi. This involves sourcing and importing fruit from around the world to ensure a continuous supply throughout the year.

Chief Operating Officer, Salih Hodzhov began working for Chambers 25 years ago as a fruit picker on a special visa, visiting from his village in Bulgaria where his parents grew tobacco.

Timing is everything with berries

“Soft fruit is a high-value crop with a very short shelf life, so accurate prediction helps in selling to supermarkets, they want to know in advance how much fruit you will harvest and when,” said Salih.

“If too much fruit is harvested and put on the market suddenly prices can drop, or you can’t sell it and the fruit goes to waste. Equally if we can’t meet demand or deliver the volume we promised, there is a huge financial implication for us. Accurate forecasts help maintain stable prices and supply.”

“Another issue is that soft fruit is a very labour-intensive crop so we need to make sure we have enough people to harvest at the right time so forecasts are important for that too. It’s also a big transport and logistics operation.”

Traditionally, predicting harvests involved using historical data and people walking through the rows to visually assess fruit colour and estimate readiness, which was subjective and relied on their experience and ability to see a big enough sample of fruit. “We’ve got 85 hectares of strawberries and 200 hectares of raspberries, so we don’t have enough people to cover that huge area.”

Enter Bitwise Agronomy’s GreenView AI

Simple video footage taken on a go-pro camera mounted on farm vehicles or equipment enables GreenView AI to view and assess literally tens of thousands of individual pieces of fruit at superhuman speed, and more accurately predict harvest timing and volumes.

The Bitwise Ag team has developed over 300 ripening curves for 100s of berry varieties. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) part of the equation is the system learns over time by integrating harvest data and adapts to specific crop varieties, locations and micro-climates to develop more accurate forecasts.

Salih Hodzhov has been collaborating with Bitwise Ag for about three years now, and has witnessed first-hand how the harvest predictions keep getting better.

“There was scepticism at first because growers don’t believe that anyone can do it better than us, but after trying it, I’ve found it to be a good system that provides valuable data and we know it’s still evolving.”

“Bitwise Ag is much more objective – the data is factual, not an opinion – it can look at big areas and is much more exact, so we can make much better-informed operational decisions so there is a lot of benefit.”

“The system learns with input from the growers by incorporating harvest records and climatic conditions, improving its forecasting accuracy over time, so we work with the system and now we are starting to see the benefits.”

Chambers Group prides itself on innovation and industry leadership, whether it is developing new fruit varieties or adopting new technologies to increase yields and efficiencies or to reduce waste, carbon emissions or supply chain risks.

Chambers is advancing its use of Bitwise’s GreenView AI by mounting cameras on field robots and other machinery, aiming to automate data collection and reduce labour. It currently uses the technology for strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries, and will likely look at blackberries soon.

Salih hopes the overseas suppliers will start to use GreenView too, as it is very important to know where and when their harvests are forecast as well.