drones on sme

Ben Gielow, General Counsel of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle System International said that agriculture, far and away, is going to be the dominant market for UAV operations.

The use of commercial drones in the agriculture and framing industry is highly related to the concept of precision agriculture or satellite farming. This is a new management concept emerged in the United States in the 80’s decade. The National Research Council of the USA defines: “Precision agriculture is a management strategy that uses information technologies to bring data from multiple sources to bear on decision associated with crop production”.

According to Srinivasan (2006) and, Gebber and Adamchuk (2010) the implementation of PA has been demonstrably successful in industrial farming because of its large-scale and commercial production emphasis, especially with high- value cash crops that receive large amounts of agrochemical inputs and enter markets with strong differentiation based on quality, such as viticulture and horticulture.

Gassner, Coe and Sinclair (2013) identified a stepwise process that entails PA technologies:

1. Define the yield-limiting factor or factors at a given time;

2. Mapping these factors across the region of interest;

3. Signing the variable-rate management strategy that addresses the spatial variability of these factors and

4. Assessing the monitoring environmental d economic benefits of implementing variable-rate management strategies.

Agreeing to the last process, we can think that the UAV technology is highly related to the development of the future progress of the agriculture and farming industry. That is to say, that it would be impossible to implement these methods without the proper technology to do it. In t...

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...p to cut herbicide costs. In some countries like Japan and Australia farmers benefit from spot weed control in a more sophisticated setup. UAVs will not replace traditional crop spraying, however it will foster the practice of spot-application. It is likely to think in the implementation of just-in-time strategies to reduce inputs inventories and associated carrying cost. No huge inventory only customized inputs delivered when needed saving time and money on herbicide supplies.

In brief, understanding plant characteristics leads to better crop management.

Nowadays, it is still premature to compare the performance of common aerial surveillance with UAVs since they offer different characteristics. Micro and small UAVs are cost-efficient tools, which offer accurate solutions for precision agriculture strongly linked to a photogrammetric workflow and up-to-date data.