If you've seen the movie Looper, you'll remember the scene above, showing what appears to be a drone crop sprayer. I think agricultural uses of UAVs will be one of the most interesting commercial markets, so this post lists a few suggested starting places and resources for people who want to follow this sector.
- New DIY Drones Agricultural UAVs user group
- Google+ Agricultural UAV community
- Report on potential size of agricultural UAV market (chart below)
Comments
I like the image capture idea. I want to do that on our farm. Our spread is over 30 miles and time wise a done could launch from a station out there and send the data back.
Troy,
I don't see the NAAA liking this technology at all, it's a threat. I think they'll go the way of ITU.
Joshua
I would agree about loving the planes and hating the chemicals.
I can say that over the past 40 years what we work with is getting better.
I can also say that per acre the farm fields work with less chemicals then golf cources and many homes. what makes the chemicals a possable proble for us is the volume of work. One plane can treat over 1000 acers in a day, that is a lot of chemical but it is also thinly applied. Something that is nasty like Asana XL from DuPont is applied at 6 to 10 Ounces per acre. There is also alot to be said about drift control, and propper application.
Joshua
I know that monitoring can help reduce and pin point the use of spraying for specific problems. But for Potatoes or Cranberries there will be the frequent treatment for prevention of problems. Sometimes there is no cure for a problem only prevention, so you need to spray to prevent crop loss. Also in corn the use of quadris fungicide has been found to not only prevent crop loss but when applied at the correct time produces a 10% increase in yield.
I have had to do the task of taking pictures of the fields for the farmers to look at, and I would like it if I could just send a drone to do that job. But we would need a way to keep everyone safe when I come in with the crop duster too.
I know that the farmers would love to have daily or weekly updates on their fields but the drone will need a way to communicate with the crop duster so the two don’t meet. And the crop dusters are appropriately named AirTractors, there is not much on board for gadgets. They don’t need any radios in them at all. So this makes communication with a drone quite difficult. If there is a person around operating the drone they can tell the drone to come home when a duster is in the area but the farmers would much rather just launch the drone and come back later and recover the drone and images without needing to babysit it.
Troy,
I just saw on your profile page that come from a family of crop-dusters, I didn't mean to be flippant with the above remark about reducing spraying :-)
I love watching the crop-dusters work, but I hate the chemicals.
Troy,
I agree. The monitoring aspect will hopefully reduce most of the spraying, and therefore become the primary use of aerial AG-bots.
I can see the use for agricultural surveillance but I don't see this getting into NAAA http://www.agaviation.org/ any time soon. the payloads and department of AG restrictions I see holding this back for quite some time.
Is 3DR working on agricultural drone because this is what I found on CNBC "Mr. Anderson, in contrast, said that later this year, his company would introduce a helicopter for agricultural surveillance that would sell for less than $1,000. "That's not per hour, that's for the helicopter," he said."