Drones in the Agriculture Industry
Soil and Field Analysis
Instrumental at start of crop cycle.
Produce precise 3D maps for early soil analysis.
Useful in planning seed planting patterns.
Provides data for irrigation and nitrogen level management.
Planting
Shoot pods with seeds and plant nutrients into the soil
Decreases planting costs by 85%
Provides plants all the nutrients necessary to sustain life.
Startups have created drone-planting systems that achieve an uptake rate of 75 percent.
Crop Spraying
Distance-measuring equipment—ultrasonic echoing and lasers such as those used in the light-detection and ranging, or LiDAR, method.
Enables a drone to adjust altitude as the topography and geography vary, and thus avoid collisions.
Drones can scan the ground and spray the correct amount of liquid, modulating distance from the ground and spraying in real time for even coverage.
Increased efficiency with a reduction of in the amount of chemicals penetrating into groundwater.
Crop Monitoring
Very inexpensive.
Today, time-series animations can show the precise development of a crop and reveal production inefficiencies, enabling better crop management.
Rapid image delivery, meaning that the image taken can quickly be transferred to the user.
Vast fields and low efficiency in crop monitoring together create farming’s largest obstacle.
Irrigation
Drones with hyperspectral, multispectral, or thermal sensors can identify which parts of a field are dry or need improvements.
Once the crop is growing, drones allow the calculation of the vegetation index, which describes the relative density and health of the crop, and show the heat signature, the amount of energy or heat the crop emits.
Health Assessments
Scans a crop using both visible and near-infrared light, drone-carried devices can identify which plants reflect different amounts of green light and NIR light.
Information can produce multispectral images that track changes in plants and indicate their health.
As soon as a sickness is discovered, farmers can apply and monitor remedies more precisely.