TECHNOLOGY
Drones can assist with irrigation design validation, scheduling and topography mapping.
D
uring the last two decades, technological advances have made a significant impact on many aspects of our lives. The agricultural sector has incorporated such technologies through precision agriculture applications. Remote sensing, using satellites, has been widely adopted
for farming to monitor large-scale operations. Although spatial and temporal resolution tradeoffs can be a concern, these issues can be solved using unmanned aerial vehicles. Generally known as drones, UAVs show potential for applications related to daily farming operations such as scouting, irrigation, spraying, weed detection and crop monitoring.
Drones can be equipped with various sensors (cameras) that are readily available in the market. Sensor selection is typically based on the output of interest, available sensor and cost. An RGB sensor is more suitable for visual inspection, while a multispectral sensor can be utilized for crop vegetation growth monitoring. Some drones can use a combination of multispectral and thermal sensors for evapotranspiration estimation for irrigation scheduling purposes. Drones with the addition of a real-time kinematic base station can be used for elevation data.
Arkansas is known as the rice capital of the United States, accounting for half of the country’s total rice acres. Arkansas rice producers have used many irrigation management practices over the years, such as flood, pivot and furrow irrigation. When the groundwater in the aquifers started to decline, producers began implementing several irrigation
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water management strategies such as multiple inlet rice irrigation, alternate wetting and drying, and land leveling. Arkansas producers are making incredible strides in increasing irrigation efficiency to sustain water resources for future generations.
Drones are useful for multiple irrigation applications such as rice levee tracing, irrigation design, irrigation design validation, irrigation scheduling, and topography mapping for surface, sprinkler and drip irrigation design. The following are some examples of drone usage for irrigation.
Contour levee tracing Contour levees are considered one of the most laborious methods of managing rice irrigation, due to the substantial mechanical operation requirements to design and maintain levee spills, plant rice on levees, control water depth with unpredictable precipitation, and manage levees to avoid potential levee failure. In this method, levees are constructed to maintain a particular slope in each paddy, as shown in figure 1A (pg. 12). Straight levees is another method of growing rice (see fig. 1B, pg. 12). Scott Matthews is a rice grower in Arkansas, and he utilized drone imagery to trace each contour and straight rice paddy for irrigation design and management purposes, as shown in figure 1C (pg. 12).
Rice growers can utilize drones to measure the surface area for each rice paddy to enhance the irrigation design. Such an application has many advantages, including adjusting the irrigation gates in the polypipe, managing precipitation without causing levee failure and enhancing crop growth and yield.
Summer 2020 | Irrigation TODAY 11
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