Top Questions Related to the Drone Use in Agriculture

Top Questions Related to the Drone Use in Agriculture

As far as in current times, drones gradually become more affordable, many growers start using them with the aim to implement this rapidly-growing technology on their farms. Many farmers from the Northern Hemisphere are interested in applying drones for their needs. Every day, they are busy and spend lots of time controlling the growth of their crops, calculating the amount of fertilizers and nutrients they need to use and estimating their yields for the season. For all the above-mentioned questions, the major part of them is using drones. Aircrafts became an irreplaceable tool, which allows them to gather the valuable information. This year, the amount of farmers who use drones became bigger as compared to the previous years.

Nevertheless, when experts talk to such farmers with the aim to hear their feedback about the work of this technology, they hear the same questions. Right now, we will analyze each of them and try to give the fullest answer to them.

How high should I fly?

Unfortunately, there is no certain formula, which can tell you the exact height. Instead of this, you should have an understanding about the flight altitude. This can help you determine the corresponding settings.

Analyzing such aspect as flight altitude, you should know one simple truth – the higher you fly, the more ground you will cover. Nevertheless, the maximum permitted flight by the FAA is 400 ft. Don’t forget, that when you fly too high, it may influence the image quality. For that reason, it depends on how you wish to use your map and your personal purposes.

How to map large areas?

The most widely-spread issue of all drone users engaged in agriculture is poor wifi in such areas. Yet still, there is a way-out.

First, you can plan all your flights in advance. Those users who worry about connectivity issues can create their flight plans beforehand through the use of special software.

One more problem – a short battery life. If your overarching goal is to map big areas (those territories that are bigger than 100 acres), you can face the problem of short battery life. The maximum time of flight of drones is around 30 minutes. As a rule, this time isn’t enough. An ideal solution is to bring several extra batteries. Having changed the batteries, you can re-open the plan you are flying. As a rule, the plan will automatically restart the mission.

How to view plant health data?

To discern about this question, you need to get acquainted with such indices as NDVI or Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. It is regarded to be the oldest and the most widely used indexes, which are used in a combination with NIR imagery (near infrared). At first gaze, these terms seem to be complicated for understanding. Nevertheless, they are obligatory. All healthy plants reflect only near infrared and green light. To increase the contrast of a map, vegetation indexes show the quantity of light captured across wavelengths. Such vegetation indexes were created with the aim to cater for different types of camera. For that reason, a NIR camera is required.

Nevertheless, some professionals use the RGB camera on their Phantom 4, aiming to assess wind damage.

What aspects should I be aware of?

There are several aspects that may be useful for those who buy drones with the aim to use them in agriculture. They are as follows:

Zone Management. When you apply zones, it will be easier for you to aggregate the data in a map. This will simplify your work related to detecting health differences between big areas.
Plant Count Tools. These days, there are many third-party tools that allow users to calculate visibly distinct plants or analyze stand counts.

How to export maps with the aim to compare them to other data?

The prime objective of such drone maps is to help the owner to find out what areas of crop need more attention. Some of them may be stressed or damaged and you can’t even guess about it. So, to get a deeper insight, you have a chance to combine the drone map with the last year’s yield map or soil sample data.

As you see, there are lots of tools available to farmers. On that score, we see that drone technology is more than just interesting, it is very useful and allows farmers to get more information about their yields. Furthermore, they can calculate the amount of income from this yield.

We can’t fly, but we have the technology which can be your eye from the sky. So, if there is an opportunity to use it with the aim to develop your business, you should definitely make use of this opportunity. In case, you are searching for a reputable store to buy DJI drones in Dubai, welcome to aeromotus.com. We know everything about so rapidly developing drone technology.