Tech corner Is a drone useful in ag?
With all the buzz about drone use in agriculture, some growers are left asking, “Is drone imagery useful in my operation?”
By Drew Baustian
Drone retrofitted with a kit to provide additional imagery capability. Photo credit: MicaSense
T
here’s been a lot of enthusiasm and discussion around drone use in agriculture over the last
few years. When commercialization of drones (aka unmanned aerial vehicles) hit the mainstream, many drew a vague connection between the technology (a flying machine with a mounted camera) and scouting farm fields.
An excellent illustration of this inexplicit relationship happened during a drones- in-agriculture webinar I attended about two years ago. After 45 minutes of a dazzling software interface demonstration complete with three to four indices and composites to view plant health, one of the questions posed by a fellow attendee was, “Can you share any specific real-life examples of how drone imagery has helped in farm management?”
The host confidently stated, “Yes, we definitely have some specific real-life examples ... time savings, chemical savings and increased yield.” Needless
6 Irrigation TODAY | January 2019
to say, the person asking the question was disappointed with the response.
Picking on the webinar host is not my intention; the lack of specificity regarding how drones actually help in agriculture has been an epidemic. Most ag industry professionals have felt confident that a drone/camera combo should provide value to a farm, but defining that value has been challenging.
Camera limitations
Many growers have purchased consumer drones to experiment how they can be utilized in farm management. With a normal RGB (color) camera mounted to the drone, a grower can get a bird’s-eye view of a field to see general damage from weather events or identify the scale of the effects of an improper nutrient application. The drone can also be used to take fun videos of the equipment in operation. These applications are good, even enjoyable, but they fall short of the early expectations regarding drone use in agriculture.
The main limitation of a consumer drone is the camera. It’s an RGB imager, which means it’s capturing reflectance at red, green and blue, allowing the user to take pictures and video that are identical to what can be viewed by the naked eye. To discover more hidden problems in a field, such as a small leak in an irrigation system or the emergence of a fungus, more advanced sensors like multispectral and thermal must be used.
A drone with a multispectral camera, rather than a normal RGB camera, is able to capture unique images of plants and fields due to the camera’s multiple imagers, each of which targets specific reflectance data. Multispectral sensors can provide imagery that more clearly identifies physiological changes in plants, whether due to growth
The lack of specificity regarding how drones actually help in agriculture has been an epidemic.
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