Just as farmers in the past traded their plows for tractors, today’s farmers are trading old methods for new. With the advent of modern technology, fresh possibilities have grown. The newest method is called precision agriculture and it uses drones.
Precision agriculture was originally enabled by GPS, allowing farmers to program GPS points into automatic seeders and sprayers so they could micromanage crops — but only after physically surveying the crops, which could take days or even weeks. Using drones, this work can be cut to a matter of hours.
But there’s a catch: Drones are currently illegal for this purpose.
As for the future, drone use is up in the air. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is presently reconsidering its policies on commercial drones.
Agribotix, a Boulder-based drone company, is eager for these changes to take place.
“Right now the FAA is just shooting itself in the foot by dragging so long in getting regulations out,” Agribotix founder Tom McKinnon says. “Right now their regulations are pretty absurd.”
In February, the FAA proposed new guidelines to “limit flights to daylight and visual-line-of-sight operations [and address] height restrictions, operator certification, optional use of a visual observer, aircraft restrictions, registration and marking, and operational limits.” These would not apply to recreational use of drones.
“We have tried to be flexible in writing these rules,” Michael Huerta, FAA administrator, said in a press release. “We want to maintain today’s outstanding level of aviation safety without placing an undue regulatory burden on an emerging industry.”
Until new rules are finalized, for which Congress issued a September 2015 deadline, the current FAA rules remain in place. Organizations wishing to use commercial drones will have to apply for a permit. In May there were nearly 1,000 organizations on the waitlist.
Jean Hediger, a farmer with 1,400 hectares in northeastern Colorado, is one of many agriculturalists who use drones without certifications despite federal restrictions. In 2014, Hediger partnered with Agribotix to explore the potential of using aerial imaging to get on-demand information to farmers about their crops.
The first time Agribotix scanned the Hediger farm, they used a fixed-wing Hornet drone fitted with a GoPro camera modified to include high-quality, non-distorting lenses and near-infrared filters. Plants can’t use near-infared light for photosynthesis, so their leaves reflect these wavelengths to prevent drying.
“If the cameras pick up a strong near-infared signal it denotes more or bigger leaves and therefore good crop growth, whereas a low signal suggests poor growth,” says Paul Susmarski, an Agribotix software engineer.
Agribotix has now developed a vertical-flight “quad copter” that can fly 160 acres on one 20-minutes battery charge. Agribotix programs the missions using Google Earth and the drone figures out the dimensions using an internal GPS and it begins flying and taking pictures in a back and forth pattern.
Agribotix can then stitch together the drone’s photos and create a map that shows the exact spatial variability on a farm. Such a map can help growers determine pockets of low-growth or troubled areas in their crops, as they otherwise might not note.
Take corn for example.
“If you go out into corn fields there are huge variations. It’ll be from 8 inches tall in bad areas, to 5 feet tall in others. And when you are standing outside a cornfield you have no sense of that because all you see are the tall ones,” McKinnon says.
The value of using aerial technology is obvious to Agribotix. Without the special spatial knowledge, growers are forced to put fertilizer down uniformly. This can waste money, time and environmental resources.
McKinnon says agronomists think this technology could increase yields by 5 to 10 bushels per acre.
A typical yield is 200 to 250 bushels of corn per acre, which sells at approximately $4 per bushel. With the extra bushels, growers could expect $20 more per acre.
According to McKinnon, the company has had success selling its products and services across the globe. They’ve flown missions over glaciers in New Zealand, tracked vultures in Mongolia and mapped oil palms in Sumatra. The FAA has made breaking into the domestic market tough. But Agribotix isn’t losing hope.
“We’re cautiously optimistic that the new rules will help the industry,” McKinnon says.
