European agriculture is catching on fast to drones

Sunday, June 7, 2015

With today's technology, a few hundred dollars can buy efficient airborne monitoring of crops and animals – and even take the place of sheepdogs

by NORMAN DUNN

It's amazing how some apparently logical technological advances are generally ignored for years. Take drones, for instance.

These mini-helicopters have worked effectively within the armed forces of the world for the past two decades. In Europe, it took police forces another 10 years to start applying drone-borne cameras for crowd control and for safe and efficient surveillance of crime trouble spots.

Now, the police in England are quickly adopting the system. This spring, just two counties around London invested the equivalent of half a million Canadian dollars in new drone patrols. Just imagine the manpower, the time and the fuel saved each day by this type of control.

Agriculture is now catching on fast. At this year's "Precision Farming" event in England, there was a deluge of information on how drones can help out in the fields. Prices are falling. Capable four-rotor machines with battery capacity for 25 minutes' operation, a working radius of a kilometre and inbuilt return-to-base computer control are now available for the equivalent of from C$ 750 to $1,200. And that's ready-to-fly with control equipment included.

Of course, when you start including extras such as a longer-life battery, the price can spiral. Still, a reasonably good camcorder with wireless transmission system can be added to a drone for the equivalent of $180. Investing more can boost control range to five kilometres, with GPS for accurate mapping and flight route programing.        

The scope of this technology in agriculture? Well, Paul Brennan comes from a sheep farming family near Dublin in Ireland. He hit the headlines earlier this year by showing how efficiently his drone can move sheep. The aircraft's noise, combined with Paul's skillful low-level control, resulted in neat driving of the flock from one field to the next, rounding-up strays, even separating one batch of ewes from another.

During a video demonstration, the farm collie dog lay stretched out on the sidelines looking on as the drone expertly moved the animals. The day was hot and humid. Was the hound agitated about being unemployed? In these circumstances, certainly not!

As well as video cameras for accurately relaying animal positions, on hill land for instance, drone-mounted radio frequency scanners are available to pick up signals from ear-tag transponders on individual animals. Another role: keeping marauding pigeons away from emerging crops. Now available are attachments for broadcasting bird-scaring noises from drones or the fitting of lightweight fibreglass hawk dummies to the mini aircraft.

Aerial reconnaissance in agriculture is naturally nothing new. An overview has always been the best way of spotting trouble in growing crops. Thirty years ago, I visited a wheat grower in the English county of Suffolk, who pioneered using his one-man ultralight aircraft with camera for this purpose. Regular photographs of his developing crop were invaluable for precise management and disease control. No digitalization in those days, of course: the film had to be developed before analyzing. Now, the new drone power means the task is done in real time, and much more cheaply.

Are there any possible objections to this new generation of robotic drone control on cropland? Well, in the past the occasional bare strip caused by an unnoticed blocked coulter was usually known only to the operator. Now, such embarrassing oversights can be seen by a much wider viewing public. BF