Field Scale Crop Assessment with Drones

May 11, 2021

When assessing your crop across an entire field, a familiar expression may come to mind: You don’t know what you can’t see. Another familiar saying may follow, “Time is money, and every day is a bank account.”

The big question that producers ask themselves these days is, “will having a small, unmanned aircraft (drone) add value to my operation?”

Honest answer? It may, but I don’t know a specific dollar amount. Can it save you time in walking your fields? Absolutely. Can it show you the location of problems in your fields you would otherwise not see walking? Again, yes.

Let’s look at a growing season and see where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can assist your operation.

Most, if not all drones, come with a mobile app for your smartphone, iPad, or tablet. These apps are typically free and allow you to see in real-time what the drone sees from a few hundred feet in the air.

With the drone’s live feed, your eyes become the sensors and your brain acts as the computer that does the analytics. If your eyes detect something of interest, then you’re able to fly the drone down and hover over that location. Your brain now takes over and determines if this is an area you need to visit and give a closer look.

In the sections below we’ll go over how you can use drones throughout the growing season from pre-planting, planting, growing season, and harvest.

Source : msstate.edu

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators