By Margaret Lawrence and Sara Delheimer
From field crops to specialty crops, and livestock to aquaculture, the use of drones offers growers new opportunities to reduce inputs and improve resource management, reducing uncertainty and increasing profitability.
Drones have yet to reach their full potential in agriculture, but scientists across the United States are developing technologies to ensure the nation’s farmers benefit from their transformative possibilities.
Remote sensing with drones offers new ways to examine fields and pastures from a macro view of an entire landscape to the micro views of individual plants and animals. Additionally, they can provide insight into soil conditions, including moisture and insect and disease pressures. But remote sensing is only one of the many ways that drone can be used to improve profitability and increase production efficiency in agricultural systems.
Drones can be used to replace currently more costly and dangerous practices. For example, in cherry orchards, seasonal summer rain can damage sweet cherries by producing cracks on the skin. In the Pacific Northwest, growers use helicopters that fly over cherry crops after rainfall to remove rainwater from the fruit. Researchers at Washington State University found that drones were almost as effective at removing rainwater as the traditional helicopter approach. Similarly, a drone could potentially be used for other similar application such as frost protection.
Source : usda.gov