More than 50 area farmers made their way to Memering Ag Service just outside of Washington on Thursday morning to learn more about the use of unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, better known as drones, on farms.
Jim Love, light robotics manager with Beck’s, the largest family-owned retail seed company in the country, put on a demonstration illustrating the role drones and other UAVs can play on the farm.
“Our whole goal is to help farmers be more successful,” said Love, as he watched the crowd react to the drones soaring over the glossy, emerald green field of corn. “We’re trying to provide them with information that will help make more informed decisions about their crops. We want to make using drones affordable and we want to help teach how to properly use them and what the rules for using them are.”
Love said drones have become easier to operate legally over the last several months. “Last year at this time, it was hard to fly a drone legally,” Love said, adding that Beck’s offers drones available for purchase and can also service the UAVs. “Now, the rules are pretty easy for people to follow.”
“Drones are so fresh and so new the etiquette for using them hasn’t been taught,” he said mentioning that the next big thing in agriculture aside from drones may very well be ground-based robots. “There’s a lot of things drones can do, but there’s a lot of things the ground-based robots can do as well.”
Drones, Love said, are often tricky to use to get stand counts, or the approximate number of plants in a field. Ground-based robots, however may be able to more easily accomplish the task.
“The bottom line is the problem with stand counts is getting the corn big enough to count but not big enough that the plants are touching,” he said. “A lot of times in demonstrations, they’ll show you tomato plants because they are easier to count.”
Love said the drones, while sometimes tricky to initially figure out, can be quite beneficial on the farm.
“Through the use of drones, we able to help determine cropping patterns and identify issues within their fields,” he said, noting that drones come in a variety of sizes and price ranges to meet the needs of nearly every farm.”Never buy a drone you can’t afford to lose. When you’re trying to figure out what you are doing and how you are going to use it, you want to get in on the low end and then want for more." While not all the data collected by the drones as they sail over the fields is useful, Love said, there are times the information provided can be put to good use.
“It’s kind of like a cell phone. You have all these pictures on there you’ll never get printed out, but every once in awhile, you’ll get a pearl of value,” he said, adding that Beck’s has been involved in aerial technology since 1992, although the images collected weren’t always useful. “It was like getting an old, really expensive newspaper. What they were getting wasn’t a valuable tool two weeks later when they were getting the images back. With the drones, you can get images back the next day.”
Over the last few weeks, Love said he’s been doing several drone-related programs at no cost at the farms of Beck’s seed retailers like Memering Farms.
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