PRECISION AGRICULTURE

A DAY ON THE FARM

- Patrick Sherman

Drones are often touted for their ability to benefit farmers through precision agriculture, but solving real-world problems requires a more carefully considered approach—and spinning propellers only represents a small fraction of the work to be done.

Even within the professional uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) industry, there is a tendency to regard precision agriculture applications as a one-size-fits-all proposition. You fly your drone over a farmer's field with a weird, expensive camera that has five lenses, plug the resulting images into an expensive piece of software, and you get a false-color map of the crop with green, yellow, and red areas reflecting plant health.

This, in turn, is meant to tell the farmer where more water or fertilizer is required. In theory, that's great. In the real world, however, the problems tend to be a little more subtle and complex. That's what I found out when I spent a day on the farm with my friends Dr. Joe Cerreta and Dr. Scott Burgess of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide Campus Department of Flight.

It turns out that after practicing agriculture for the past 3,000 years, farmers have gotten pretty good at figuring out where they need more water and fertilizer. They do have urgent problems that UAS may be able to help them solve, but only if you're willing to listen to what they actually have to say. For their study of agricultural applications of UAS, Joe and Scott listened to Dave Turnbull, a farmer in central Oregon with five acres in hemp— more than 8,000 plants, in all.