Article taken from The Vegetable Farmer, July 2017.
Some of the most significant advances in agronomy available to UK farmers were on display at Agrovista's stand at Cereals 2017 last month. Among these was a recently launched commercial drone service, developed by Plantsystems, Agrovista's precision services arm.
This service offers flight packages carried out by the company's fully-approved unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operators, or a processing service for farmers who have their own drones.
""The development of drone technology is providing real potential for using relatively simple hobby tools for more complex agronomy tasks," says Lewis McKerrow, Agrovista's head of precision technology.
Research by the company has shown that higher-specification hobby drones costing around £1200-1800 fitted with a goodquality standard visual camera can do most of the tasks carried out by professional drones costing several times as much.
""Good hobby drones are fine for identifying most parameters of field performance," says Mr McKerrow. ""You need something with a reasonable flight time of 15 minutes or more, even when it's a bit windy. The drone should also carry a camera that can provide 3.5cm resolution at 120m flying height, allowing you to create maps showing establishment, biomass, weeds and disease and to carry out plant counts.""
Agrovista uses its MaplT Pro software to process data captured by the drone from several passes during the season to create field maps. These can be used for variable rate drilling and nitrogen application, and even patch spraying weeds with high resolution accuracy.
Flight and data processing charges vary according to location and job size, typically costing £3-4/ha. Drone operators who only require the data processing service will pay around 50p/ha per zone map and £1/ha for a zone and rate map.