While several industries such as the military and (ironically) the conversationalist trades are starting to unlock the potential of droned reconnaissance, farmers have been a little wary.
To be honest it’s understandable — for most of us, we revel in the concept of simplicity and shake our heads at needless complication. For the most part, all any true farmer really needs is a good tractor and a working knowledge of the land. Likely when we think of drones in ag, we conjure up images of fussing over another needy piece of equipment that needlessly takes up the ever shortening precious time we already don’t have.
But like all things in the ag sphere, UAV’s do possess an incredible ability for autonomy. A drone is essentially a flying robot, meaning it has the ability to operate in most weather conditions at any hour of the day for extended periods of time. While technology may not have yet reached a point where drones can be operated continuously for 24hrs a day, they do greatly extend a farm’s ability to perform unique and critical tasks that are either intricate or needlessly mundane.
Four roles for drones on your farm
Due to the limited payloads of small commercial drone aircraft we’re unlikely to see drones used in large spraying operations or used for hauling critical harvest loads. But while an axe is used for brute force, drones can be considered similar to scalpels — finely tuned for intricate, yet still highly critical operations such as the following:
NDVI and spectral analysis
Hyperspectral imaging for drones isn’t exactly in its infancy, in fact, an entire industry already exists for both supplying and supporting imaging analysis for UAV’s. The camera’s themselves vary in price from a very large investment ($80k) to smaller, yet still remarkably powerful imaging systems that bottom out at around $3,000. In a previous article I discussed the absolute positives with incorporating NDVI into your ROI boosting strategy, but how does drone crop health imaging differ from one-off or subscription based satellite images?
The first is resolution — satellite imaging can boast incredible resolutions, some with as much as 1m square, but believe it or not it’s possible fo r drones to give you an even more intimate perspective than satellites. For a start drones can fly below regular cloud cover, meaning every single image is 100% accurate and the day’s imaging doesn’t include analytical anomalies such as shadows. The downside of drone NDVI analysis is frequency in the number of images, with every crop health image set requiring a time consuming pass throughout your fields on regular intervals throughout the season.
Drones: mission "possible"Scouting and observations
Spectral analysis can only go so far and at some point the underlying cause of any yield limiting factors that your imaging might uncover will need to be addressed. This is where drones will absolutely shine, as they access difficult or inaccessible parts of your fields to search for pests, weeds or disease using high resolution cameras. They will capture imagery from the field then return to fly over the farmhouse before uploading onboard data to the cloud before heading out to do it all again. When paired with an FMS application such as AgDNA, this data can be quickly analyzed and then interpreted to determine what the potential problem is, its exact GPS location and how it can be addressed.
Precision crop spraying
The average ag drone is equipped with a cadre of sensors that allow it to orient itself while in flight — this means it knows what way is up, what’s around it at all times and what the topography of the land is like. These same sensor systems also include allowances for liquid measurement and spray volume. As the next logical step in our drone chain, once a yield limiting factor has been detected via onboard high resolution imagery and an appropriate course of action has been decided to remove it, the drone can fly itself back to the exact same GPS coordinates logged against the scouting observation and administer a small but precise application of pesticide, insecticide or even liquid fertilizer. The result: a precise application that doesn’t require the expenditure of spraying an entire field.
Irrigation
Hyperspectral and Multispectral imaging devices can do more than just observe crop health — they can also be used to determine soil moisture levels and generate maps that indicate the irrigation needs of your fields. In this regard it’s best to think of drones as early warning devices, because as we know poor or overly irrigated fields can have a dramatic effect on yield.
Should you invest in drones?
The truth is we’re actually not that far off having the four operations listed above becoming the norm on farms in your local community. Once we are, the most important factor in the equation won’t be a drone’s supported hardware, it will be the Farm Management Software platform that takes the analytical data the drone collects and turns it into actionable insights.
The cost of the drone affects the integrity of its data, but in the end they make up a single strand in the interconnected web of your farm’s precision network.
This is how drones can and are drastically impacting a farm’s ROI; by providing even more precision accurate data points in your farm’s web of IoT enabled devices you end up driving better decision making. We’ve all heard this a million times before, but it’s undeniable that variable rate precision ag has a huge effect on input costs and workable hours, both of which have a huge impact on your bottom line.
The data that was used to generate these VRx calculations? They came from drones.
Drones aren’t for everyone and they aren’t yet practical for every farm type, but they’re proof positive that accurate data is the driving force behind boosting your yearly ROI. Because of this I’d say that drones are definitely a future investment for your farm. They’re autonomous, cheap and can perform useful operations that can assure the absolute accuracy of your analytical data.
The time to invest may not be now, but it absolutely will be sooner than you think.
