Article taken from Farmers Weekly, 23 June 2017.
Growers who have bought a drone to manage their crops can now learn how to get the most from it after the launch of a new service from agronomy group Agrovista.
There is huge interest in drones and some farmers have bought their own kit, but are unsure how to use them or handle the data.
""To help farmers, we can come on farm to show how to set it up [the drone], fly it safely and use software to analyse the data," said the company's head of precision technology, Lewis Mckerrow.
He suggested there are two key times to fly over crops. An early season flight will generate data to create variable seeding maps.
Then a second flight at growth stage 30/31 enables farmers to tweak fertiliser rates across the field according to crop biomass.
Growers who only require the data processing service will pay about 50p/ha per zone map and £1/ha for a zone and rate map.
For those who don't have a drone, Agrovista offers a full service using its own quadcopters and for which there is increasing demand.