I made a short and rather unusual research trip recently to attend Fruit Focus, an industry event for the fruit industry in the UK. This is rather different from the typical optics conferences I frequent, for one thing it was semi-outdoors, with a series of stands and tents in a field at the NIAB EMR site in East Malling, Kent. I have attended before as a visitor, but this year our collaborators at NIAB had kindly organised for us to run some demos in their tent, an opportunity we gratefully took.
We have two collaborative projects with NIAB, both on using optical coherence tomography for soft fruit imaging. Josh Fennel, a PhD student whose supervisory team I sit on, presented some work from his PhD on imaging and detecting latent fungal infection in cherries. Dr Radu Stancu, the postdoc employed on our BBSRC grant with NIAB on a related project that is led by Prof Adrian Podoleanu, came along to discuss his work, and we also had a live demo of a low-cost OCT system that visitors could try on some samples.
Scott Raffle and Dr Matevž Papp-Rupar had arranged for us to be on the NIAB ‘tour’, and so we gave some brief talks, explaining the basics of OCT technology, and why we think it might be useful for agriculture. This generated a couple of new contacts, and hopefully helped spread the word about this technology to a new audience.
It was also fascinating seeing some of the research being carried out at NIAB. It’s an interesting organisation, a charity that carries out research but also provides lots of commercial services to industry. Plant science seems an under-appreciated field in general, despite its huge importance for our food security and the environment. I suspect there are lots of unexplored applications of optics, very few people seem to be working in this area, so perhaps there are some opportunities, providing we can keep the costs down.
In any case, it was a useful and enjoyable day, helped by some beautiful weather and some delicious food samples available from many of the stalls.