by Trevor Bacque
Officially known as an unmanned aerial vehicles, most people know them better as drones. Maybe you have one yourself. If so, you’re not alone. They’re an increasingly common sight, thanks in part to cost-friendly models, intuitive controls and general novelty. Whether it’s used for wedding photos, a realty listing or helping navigate what’s around the bend on a hike, drones are widely used. In the agricultural world though, farmers are high on drones for a whole set of other reasons.
Farmers were always first
Farmers have long enjoyed pictures from high up. It would be hard to visit a Canadian farmer and not find an aerial shot of the farm somewhere at their house. Farmers also employed aerial photography to mark out boundary and legal property lines. Drones can do these tasks now and for a fraction of the price, but the real opportunity is to have drones replace day-to-day farm tasks.
Common uses today
A common drone application on-farm today is crop scouting, the age-old practice of walking a field to check on the status of weeds, diseases or insect pests. It’s common to perform this task once a week or more during critical growth stages of a plant.
Because it’s very time-consuming, Many farmers hire an agronomist to assist with crop scouting. As such, it’s becoming normal for an agronomist’s toolkit to include a drone for scouting. A drone allows a person to scout from the comfort of a pickup truck, or, depending on field proximity and drone range, their house. They cover a larger area faster without disturbing any plants.
For cattle ranchers, many have their animals graze in large pastures that could be many hectares in size, often with undulating hills, deep valleys or wrapped around dense brush. Drones make it easier to track the animals and their general health and appearance. Given the ominous buzzing and whirring of the drones, cows are naturally skittish around them. Some ranchers now use drones to herd the animals to different pastures. In wintertime, it is especially helpful as it can be dangerous to traverse certain geography by either quad or horseback.
Precision farming thanks to drones
Drones are now doing much of the heavy lifting for researchers in early stage crop development. Annually, researchers test thousands of potential plants across crop types to develop new varieties that can produce more seeds, resistant to disease, are more climate resilient or have other beneficial traits. The painstaking work of assessing these plants is now done by drones and machine learning. Drones can record countless images of new strains, then plants can be categorized using artificial intelligence based on observable characteristics, from lodging—whereby a plant head droops over and the seeds fall to the ground—to stalk width, days to flowering, emergence and more. This shaves time off the conventional breeding process, which means new varieties can be made available much sooner.
These aircrafts are also being outfitted with special imaging sensors which allow them to determine the severity among hail damaged crops by comparing it with vegetation indices related to a given crop. Similarly, sensors on drones can collect normalized difference vegetation index information, which is a measure of plant health and density. This can inform a producer as to when they should move cattle next for grazing purposes or to know the optimal time to apply fungicides.
Drones can also be used to comprehensively map out digital surface models of their fields, which includes showing changes in elevation. This is helpful in the fight against run-off and nutrient overloading of nearby waterways. By understanding boundaries and slopes, farmers can accurately redraw buffer zones. As the information is uploaded into field equipment, machines automatically go around the new field borders during seeding, spraying and harvest.
Farmers can similarly use these sensors to calculate the amount of biomass in a pasture and even volume in a manure pile.
Sustainable droning
Many have tested drones to “spot spray,” whereby a drone specifically targets a problem area in a field, and nothing else. Large-scale machinery is just scratching the surface of precision spraying, but drones can fly, spray and return to base before a farmer could even drive their machinery to a problem area. Selective drone spraying reduces diesel use, lessens the risk of disease, pest and weed resistance due to overuse and saves a farmer time and money.
Pioneering farmers are working hard to have drones be part of their sustainable farming efforts. Australian grain farmer Andrew Watson uses drones to parachute beneficial insects into his crop fields to kill predator bugs that destroy plants.
New tech, new rules
Every year, larger and larger drones are created and released to the commercial public. Drones that weigh more than 25 kilograms require a special flight licence, which involves taking a federal government-approved course. Without the right certifications, a person could be fined as much as $5,000 for illegal flight.
Drones are cool, and it will take time for their potential to be reached
Like all new and emerging tech, drones still have a long way to go. Cars weren’t perfected with a Model T and drones likewise haven’t peaked for design or capability after such a short time.
Technology continues to influence the way we all live and work and this is certainly very true for farmers too, New technologies like drones have a critical role to play in the global challenge of feeding a growing population with fewer resources while reducing the environmental impact.
Podcast: What is Vertical Farming?