Precision agriculture is the science of technology-enhancing productivity, efficiency, crop yield, and profitability. According to analysts, drones in agriculture will be worth five billion dollars in the next three years.
Drones have become a powerful tool for agronomists and farmers to assess the health of crops. Drones provide an overview of fields collecting real-time data much faster and more efficiently than traditional methods.
Thanks to drones, farmers can check how healthy their plants are, whether they need nutrients or water, or if there might be a pest activity before it gets out of control.
1. Accurate farm analysis
Drones are helping farmers when creating accurate maps called orthomosaics. Images captured by drones can be joined to get a topographical map of the farming area.
A precise color Orthomosaic Map is usually the first and most vital step in scouting. Othomosaic maps help farmers discover gaps in the crop right away. Drones can quickly find areas of visible stress during visualization of their vegetation’s growth and maturity stages.
As drones are easy to use, farmers can gain field data as often. Gathered data will help them detect problems as soon as they occur and allow them to create a plan of action and reduce any negative effect these issues may pose.
2. Drones are improving crop yields
Drones help farmers obtain crop data frequently and fast. This keeps them well informed about irrigation problems, soil conditions, and plant disease.
Thanks to precision agriculture, farmers improve overall crop yield with variable rate prescription based on data.
Using remote sensing technology, it becomes much easier to identify areas of the field that aren’t producing healthy crops. It becomes simpler to find out the problem and treat the specific area.
3. Safer Way to spray Crops
One of the main issues every farmer faces is pests and plant diseases. Manually spraying chemicals constantly poses a health hazard and is also time-consuming.
Using drones to treat infected plants instead of people and land-based machinery is much more efficient and safer.
Smart drones come with autonomous flight modes so farmers can plan flight paths around areas that need to be treated, leaving the healthy parts free from unnecessary chemicals.
4. Drones are helping with irrigation management
The larger the farm, the harder it is to keep an eye on what is happening in the fields.
Any farm irrigation system could fail, or conditions may change and affect plant growth.
Typically, monitoring fields involves hours of driving to find problems, some of which may be extremely hard to detect.
It can result in water wastage, machinery failures, and various issues that reduce efficiency and increase plant death. Flying over huge acreages, drones offer farmers an aerial view of the crops to track daily problems and progress.
5. Drones are saving money and time
One of the leading benefits of using innovative technology in agriculture is the reduced time it takes to complete a lot of tasks. Drones are time-efficient, unlike crewed aircraft for mapping, surveillance, and crop spraying.
0 Comments