By Heather Hetterick & Matt Reese
Just a few years ago, it would seem more like something out of a bad sci-fi film. But today, the possibility of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) floating over a farm taking pictures or video is a reality.
The unnerving whirring sound and ominous silhouette across the blue rural sky have triggered many opinions and possibilities for the agricultural community.
Rory Paul feels that UAVs, or drones, have many more positives than negatives. Paul is the owner of Volt Aerial Robotics in St. Louis and he sees tremendous potential for their use in agriculture.
“There are several applications we see developing. The simplest one is crop scouting. You could use a simple system like a helicopter or quad copter. The farmer can stand at the side of the field and get a bird’s eye view. There are huge advantages here because right now an agronomist can only see a small fraction of the field. If you see a problem, you get a picture of it and know exactly where it is,” he said. “The next application is mapping. You can use a fixed-wing UAV and you actually map the field creating an up-to- date digital map of the field. This allows the farmer to look at nutrient issues to develop an application plan and, technically, we could probably use precision spot spraying.”
In the distant future, he believes we could see other applications including pollination and population counts.
http://ocj.com/2013/05/drones-can-be-positive-and-negative-for-the-ag-industry/
Comments
Gary, I completely agree with you. I'll never understand the whole privacy paranoia thing, there's no point belabouring that point again.
I also kind of like targeted ads. I've now been exposed to things that never would have been brought to my attention otherwise.
I read this whole article and the reality is that for the Ag industry, the potential use of "drones" is hugely overwhelmingly positive.
And the concerns are the exact same concerns we had and have about computers themselves, that our "privacy" will somehow be violated to our particular detriment.
This whole privacy thing (fear of exposure) seems to drive this entire debate and for the most part even with all of the privacy invading technologies, it really hasn't had much of a downside, I'd rather see adds for multicopters than bras and my computer and the retailers know that, so what.
And envisioning the potential damage caused by a neighbors drone looking over at his crop, well, kind of hard to come up with a scenario for that one isn't it.
And if they are doing truly illegal things (a red river comes to mind) I'd really rather they were looking anyway.
Invasion of privacy isn't the issue here, infringing on our liberty is.
And for no reason other than a huge blown out of proportion non existent problem.