3 Common Questions About Drones in Agriculture

Here are a few things which you should keep in mind before buying or using an agriculture drone

How do I view plant health data? Do I need a special camera?

Healthy plants reflect a lot of near-infrared (NIR) and green light and absorb a lot of red light. Vegetation indices interpret the amount of light captured across different wavelengths in order to increase the contrast in your map and highlight variability in a way that corresponds to plant health or stress. Different vegetation indices were developed for different purposes and for different camera or sensor types. NDVI is one of the oldest and most well-known indices, and it’s intended to be used with NIR imagery.

What this means is that if you want to use the NDVI index for true NDVI, you need a NIR camera. However, if you don’t have a NIR camera, you can still use a vegetation index to highlight variability. In fact, one of the indices you’ll find in many drones, the VARI index is intended explicitly for use with visible spectrum imagery.

What’s new that I should know about drone technology?

Zone Management

Your Plant Health map will show a high degree of detail, but sometimes it’s helpful to aggregate the data in your map into similar regions by applying zones or a grid. Not only can this help you visually detect health differences between larger areas, but it also makes the dataset more manageable to use outside as well, either for analyzing in other software or for inputting to precision equipment.

Plant Count and Stand Count Tools

Estimating plant counts using conventional methods is a time-consuming, manual process, and since only sample areas are counted, it doesn’t give you a complete view of your plant or stand count. Now Drone users can use two new third-party tools available from within the drone technology dashboard to automate the process and provide more complete, accurate data. The tool from Aglytix is intended for analyzing stand count in emergent corn and soy, whereas the tool from AgriSens specializes in counting visibly distinct plant-like trees in an orchard or tomato plantings in a field.

How can I export my map to compare it to yield maps, soil maps, and other data?

A drone map can help you tell that an area of your crop is stressed, but to understand why it’s stressed or what that means for your yield, you need more information. Ground-truthing is one important way to get it, but you can also combine your drone map with other data sets, like your soil sample data or last year’s yield map to get deeper insights.

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