Uavs in agriculture can improve planting efficiency and yield

The use of drones in smart agriculture has been increasing in recent years, however, most of them are aimed at grain crops such as wheat, corn and soybeans. Many teams are now working on applying drones to fruit tree plant protection to further improve productivity and overall yield for fruit farmers.

It has been reported that the use of crop sensors or related technologies in agricultural production could save crop producers thousands of dollars annually. In addition, crop sensors can help significantly improve the efficiency of agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer and water use, while UAVs can help reduce the negative environmental impacts of agricultural activities.

With that in mind, the University of Idaho team, which has experience working with wheat and other crops, is now focusing on applying drone technology to fruit trees. However, there is still a lack of advice from growers about what data drones should collect, or what would be most useful to help fruit production, and the collection of data depends on the specific goals of growers.

The research team believes that unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs) are most likely to be applied Yu Guoyuan and fruit tree nursery projects, including the record of tree height and canopy volume, monitoring the health and quality of fruit trees, the water management in the quarter, nutrition, and pest control, estimate the yield of fruit or other crops, creating marketing tools such as making orchard marketing films, or to assist the sales of fruit and fruit trees and so on.

Drones can help gather detailed information about crops and scout fields faster than humans can. If you want to obtain various data, spectral data or high-resolution images of the growing environment, UAVs are undoubtedly the ideal choice for detecting various crop problems today.

The team stresses that the use of drones will not only help speed up data collection, as sensors can operate in a range of the electromagnetic spectrum that is not discernable to the human eye, and are more reliable and objective than human visual assessments. In addition, UAVs can provide quantitative information that can be used for measurement and comparison, as well as descriptive qualitative information that can be obtained through observation.

In order to ensure and help growers more accurately adopt this agricultural method, the team will also further promote farmer education on remote sensing and crop monitoring using drones, such as displaying drone flights and publishing related publications.