Hugh Lowe Farms provides fresh strawberries to Wimbledon with IoT technology 

Overview

• Family-owned Hugh Lowe Farms in Kent has been the epitome of quality fruit production and delivery for many years.

• The business wanted to maintain its exceptional attention to quality and answer sustainability challenges, especially when providing strawberries for Wimbledon fans.

• By using Vodafone’s cutting-edge IoT technology, Hugh Lowe Farms delivered 1.5 million fine quality strawberries to Wimbledon and modernised its practices for sustainability requirements.

Meet Hugh Lowe Farms 

Founded in 1893, Hugh Lowe Farms is a family-owned business in Kent, South East England. The business has always strived to grow and deliver the finest strawberries, raspberries and blackberries across the UK.

Thanks to their exceptional product quality and high standards of delivery, Hugh Lowe Farms has been the sole supplier of strawberries to Wimbledon for nearly 30 years. Each year, 30 tonnes of Hugh Lowe Farms strawberries are consumed, much to the delight of tennis fans and the business.

As Marion Regan, Managing Director says: “You can’t get fresher than [our] Wimbledon strawberry.”

The challenge 

Due to the extreme demand for strawberry quality and quantity, Hugh Lowe Farms needed a solution to make its operations as efficient as possible. Strawberries must arrive at their destination in the best possible condition and often within a day.

Hugh Lowe Farms also wanted to monitor the journey of strawberries from beginning to end. Strawberries are very prone to disease, so the proposed solution needed to help with making informed decisions to achieve better, more sustainable growing conditions, which is a must for everyone in agriculture.

The solution 

As Vodafone is also an official Wimbledon partner, we were an obvious choice for Hugh Lowe Farms due to its experience with cutting-edge IoT technology.

Vodafone provided Mobile Asset Trackers, an IoT-based solution capable of tracking the journey of strawberries and giving detailed feedback on temperature, collisions, and vibrations in the packaging.

The farm was also introduced to the cloud-based MyFarmWeb platform. This collects farm data from IoT sensors that measure things like temperature and humidity. This helps decision-making to improve soil and crop health, make water use more effective and apply fertilizers and pesticides more precisely.

The benefits 

Thanks to Vodafone’s IoT technology, Hugh Lowe Farms had one of its best years ever. In 2022 alone, it sustainably grew and delivered 1.5 million fine strawberries for that year’s Wimbledon Championship event.

The new IoT technology combined with MyFarmWeb allowed the business to finally improve farm productivity, optimise farming practices and gain greater insight on how to reduce its carbon emissions.

With strawberry quality control taken to the next level, Hugh Lowe Farms is guaranteed to have a good return on yield and quality of crop for many years to come.

Less CO2 with IoT 

While the future of Hugh Lowe Farms looks bright, Vodafone is ready to provide similar solutions to other players in the agriculture industry. In fact, Vodafone estimates that IoT technology could reduce CO2 emissions by 2.4–4.8 million tons a year. By using both IoT and 5G, the UK could save 4% each year in carbon emissions, particularly in agriculture.

To achieve that, Vodafone strives to work with business customers around the world to deploy IoT technology to save more than 350 million tons of CO2 by 2030.