Benefits of Drone Technology in Agriculture

With the onset of drones in 2016 becoming more popular in industries like agriculture, pilots and farmers are innovating beneficial ways to use drones to monitor plant health, spray crops with fertilizer and pesticides, and seed fields.

The world is in an era where resources are becoming finite. For farmers and agricultural operations to combat these challenges, efficiency every step of the way is necessary.

Drones are a tool of choice for the agricultural industry to overcome the challenges of feeding a growing population while conserving resources.

This article will cover these new innovations in the industry and how it benefits farmers, drone pilots, and the agricultural industry as a whole. 

Plant health mapping

To begin, we will cover how drones are used to monitor plant health. This use of drones in agriculture is one of the most accessible forms.

To monitor plant health, pilots will utilize a drone capable of sensing and taking images on the RGB spectrum of light, near-infrared, or multispectral, and pair this drone with a flight app of choice.

Some of these apps include:

Drone Deploy

This software offers an Agriculture Package that is much more affordable than their other packages.

This package acts as a flight planning and executing app, allowing you to execute automated flights that you have designed based on the area you want mapped.

You are then able to process the data from the flight to visualize plant health.

Pix 4D 

Similar to Drone Deploy, Pix 4D offers an agriculture mapping package.

This package allows for automated flight planning and execution as well as data processing to view the plant health map. 

There are many other alternatives to these two. However, these apps are popular in the mapping community for their user-friendly interface and cloud-based processing, as well as accuracy.

Other apps and software similar to these are Litchi, WebODM, and Dronelink, among others.

» MORE: Litchi for DJI Drones (A Complete Guide)

Once the pilot has planned his automated flight, he will execute it. During the flight, the drone will fly over the field in a grid formation, taking hundreds to thousands of images.

The pilot will take these images and put them in a mapping engine such as the software and apps listed above to create an orthomosaic.

An orthomosaic is a combination of images, usually containing metadata such as geographic location, RGB reflectivity, and elevation of the surface of the ground in relation to the camera.

Combining these images creates one high-resolution image. This orthomosaic will yield the plant health map.

Shown below are several examples of what a plant health map might look like for tracking private estate plant health, plant health in forestry, and plant health in farming.

Shown below is a field of healthy crops, with a line of crops down the middle that are experiencing a lack of water due to sitting at the highest elevation of the field.

Knowing this region has a lack of water will allow farmers to allocate sprinkler systems to irrigate the area at risk.

Example of Plant Health Map via Drone Mapping

While monitoring plant health is useful to get a read on the health of your plants, the data can be used to locate deficiencies in soil nutrients.

Lack of soil nutrition is a major issue facing the world today. Farming the same fields year after year depletes the soil of its nutrients.

Since farmers learned of this, a method of alternating fields has become common. However, this method is not foolproof.

Areas of the field may contain fewer nutrients than others, which would produce less healthy crops. These stressed crops are visible on plant health maps by their overly red appearance.

Farmers will be able to locate the area of soil deficiency and add the nutrients into the soil.

Another factor causing an overly red area on a plant health map is that of a blight. This is a serious issue and, if left unchecked, can ruin a crop in its entirety.

Blights are diseases that infect and spread throughout crops and other plants.

The serious nature of these diseases cannot be understated, as the Chestnut Blight of 1904 wiped out millions of trees in a span of only a few years.

Trees are hardy plant species. Seasonal crops are much more vulnerable to these blights. Catching these blights before it’s too late is crucial to the success of a healthy harvest.

The benefit of plant health mapping with drones is that a field can be mapped and examined on a regular basis, allowing farmers and other individuals in the agricultural industry to stop a blight in its tracks.

Essentially, every drone produced today is capable of executing these flights and comes with the sensors built in to gather the data.

However, the following uses of drones in the industry have somewhat of a barrier to entry. 

Spraying drones

Spraying fertilizer and pesticides has been done by lightweight planes for over half a century.  Using drones as an alternative to lightweight planes is a cost-effective solution to spraying fertilizer and pesticides.

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