Croptimal is bringing its AI-powered crop inspection technology to smaller seed potato growers with the launch of the Croptiscan 3000, a tractor-mounted system designed to detect diseases before symptoms become visible to the human eye.
The 3-metre machine uses a camera positioned above each potato row to scan crops for diseases including Potato virus Y (PVY) and potato leafroll virus. By identifying infected plants earlier in the growing season, the system is designed to give growers more time to remove affected plants and reduce the risk of disease spreading through the field.
The launch extends technology previously deployed in Croptimal’s self-driving Croptiscan 9000 selection robot, which won the PotatoEurope Innovation Award. The company says demand for a tractor-mounted version has been driven by smaller growers seeking access to automated seed potato selection without the cost or complexity of a fully autonomous machine.
Tackling a growing labour problem
Manual selection of seed potato crops depends heavily on experienced field selectors, but finding workers with the required expertise is becoming increasingly difficult. That creates a commercial risk for growers: if diseased plants are not identified and removed in time, a seed potato field can be downgraded or rejected, potentially resulting in substantial financial losses.
The Croptiscan 3000 is positioned as an entry point into automated selection. Rather than requiring growers to replace their existing tractor-based operations with a fully autonomous system, the machine can be attached to a tractor and used with the same camera and marking technology employed in Croptimal’s self-driving models.
“We developed the tractor-mounted version because selection quality is just as important for smaller growers as it is for the largest companies in the market,” says Jeroen Wolters, co-founder of Croptimal. “Disease pressure does not look at hectares. With this model, we bring the same proven technology to a price point and scale that suit smaller businesses, with a clear growth path as the business or disease pressure increases.”
AI trained on field data
The system’s disease-recognition algorithms have been trained using practical data collected from seven operational Croptiscan machines, supplemented by data from 12 separate camera arms equipped with the same camera technology.
That field-derived dataset is intended to strengthen the system’s ability to identify disease patterns under commercial growing conditions, allowing growers to move from periodic manual inspection towards more systematic crop monitoring.
The Croptiscan 3000 has a working width of 3 metres and can travel at up to 5 kilometres per hour, giving it a scanning capacity of approximately 1.5 hectares per hour, or about 12 hectares during a working day.
Its cameras are shielded from ambient light, allowing the system to operate consistently in both bright sunlight and darkness. This gives growers the flexibility to conduct scanning during the day or at night, depending on field conditions and operational schedules.
A lower-cost entry into automation
Croptimal has priced the Croptiscan 3000 at EUR 95,000, with an additional annual service, support and algorithm-update fee of EUR 4,000.
The company is also positioning the machine as part of a longer-term automation pathway. Growers starting with the tractor-mounted model can subsequently upgrade to one of Croptimal’s fully self-driving systems, including the 3-metre four-row, 6-metre eight-row or 9-metre 12-row configurations.
The approach reflects a broader shift in agricultural automation: rather than targeting only the largest farms with fully autonomous machinery, technology developers are increasingly looking for ways to bring advanced sensing and AI into existing equipment and workflows.
