THE USE OF DRONES IN AGRICULTURE

THE USE OF DRONES IN AGRICULTURE

Stes de Necker

Even though humans have been farming for thousands of years, there’s always a new trick to learn or a new technology to try.

In modern times, these tricks come attached to small flying aircraft, a fact evidenced by the continued and growing presence of drones at agricultural expositions.

Here’s what drones promise: cheap aerial photography, with regular and infrared cameras, combined with programs that stitch together and analyze the photos, to give farmers information that was previously unattainable or too costly.

The advent of cheap and easy to use Drones is due largely to remarkable advances in the technology of small MEMS sensors (accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers, and often pressure sensors), small GPS modules, incredibly powerful processors, and a range of digital radios.

All those components are now getting better and cheaper at an unprecedented rate, thanks to their use in smart phones and the extraordinary economies of scale of that industry.

At the heart of a drone, the autopilot runs specialized software—often open-source programs created by communities such as DIY Drones.

Drones can provide farmers with three types of detailed views.

First, seeing a crop from the air can reveal patterns that expose everything from irrigation problems to soil variation and even pest and fungal infestations that aren’t apparent at eye level.

Second, airborne cameras can take multispectral images, capturing data from the infrared as well as the visual spectrum, which can be combined to create a view of the crop that highlights differences between healthy and distressed plants in a way that can’t be seen with the naked eye.

Finally, a drone can survey a crop every week, every day, or even every hour. Combined to create a time-series animation, that imagery can show changes in the crop, revealing trouble spots or opportunities for better crop management.

It’s part of a trend toward increasingly data-driven agriculture. Farms today are bursting with engineering marvels, the result of years of automation and other innovations designed to grow more food with less labour.

Tractors autonomously plant seeds within a few centimetres of their target locations, and GPS-guided harvesters reap the crops with equal accuracy.

Extensive wireless networks backhaul data on soil hydration and environmental factors to faraway servers for analysis.

But what if we could add to these capabilities the ability to more comprehensively assess the water content of soil, become more rigorous in our ability to spot irrigation and pest problems, and get a general sense of the state of the farm, every day or even every hour?

The implications cannot be stressed enough. We expect 9.6 billion people to call Earth home by 2050. All of them need to be fed. Farming is an input-­output problem. 

If we can reduce the inputs—water and pesticides—and maintain the same output, we will be overcoming a central challenge.

Agricultural drones are becoming a tool like any other consumer device, and we’re starting to talk about what we can do with them. Seen this way, what started as a military technology may end up better known as a green-tech tool, and our kids will grow up used to flying robots buzzing over farms like tiny crop dusters.