This is Stephanie and I am happy to once again be a guest blogger. Earlier last week Marketing Department Manager Albert and I
took a field trip to Indiana to check out some of the new tools available in the
agriculture industry. We attended Successful Farming’s Tools of the
Future Tour which was held at the Purdue University Beck Agricultural Center in Lafayette,
Indiana. At this event, a variety of companies showed off some of the newest technologies geared towards helping today's farmers. Some of the things we saw
were specialty designed equipment tires to reduce soil compaction, wearable
computers and micro climate sensors. However the main reason for our trip was to check out the
latest UAV/Drone technologies. Two
companies were there showing off their hexacopter style drones. Here is a close-up of one from Precision
Drone.
The other company was Crop Copter and they were actually
flying one around while we were there.
Here it is before it takes off.
Here it flies over our heads and a over corn field. (Be careful what you are doing or hiding in fields from now on.)
In talking with these two companies, we learned a lot about many
of the cool things that drones can do. Their main market tactic for farmers is that
they can scout a lot of acres in a short period of time from the air and have documented pictures. As a researcher I got really excited about
all the ideas on ways we could use one of these to scout at the NCRS. Our current (and past) interns would be happy
to hear that there is a seed research company out there that uses these to do
stand counts. They just program the
drone to fly the plot area and it takes pictures or video of the crop close
enough that you can count all plants to get the total established stand. We could also use these to help us see and record
deer and raccoon damage that we have to deal with each season. More
importantly we could monitor changes in plant health or in fertilizer treatments differences with the Normalized
Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) images. This is what devices like the Greenseeker use for variable rate nitrogen applications in corn and wheat. And the nice thing is they are all taken while recording the GPS location. So these images and data can be put into our GPS software and maps
can be overlaid with our planting treatment maps to pinpoint locations of concern.
I am going to continue to research the possibilities
of what drone technologies could provide for our NCRS test plots, and ultimately to growers. Maybe sometime this summer we will have a hexacopter test drive. So stay tuned.
