AGRICULTURAL DRONES

Precision Agriculture Is A Game Changer

For centuries, farmers have walked their fields monitoring the health of their crops. It is a time-consuming process. But this is changing. 

Agriculture drones are becoming a key driver to helping farmers increase crop production, monitor and inspect crop growth, build a richer picture of their fields, improve farming efficiency, and maximise outputs. 

Among the many benefits, drone data can be used to extract soil characteristics - including temperatures, moisture, and elevation - which helps more accurate soil sampling.

Drones and their sophisticated sensors can help farmers plan and troubleshoot irrigation systems, helping with water flow management and usage; monitor plant emergence and population to drive replanting decisions and improve crop models; and decide harvest plans by helping farmers anticipate a harvest's quality and final yield.

On-demand and high-resolution drone data is also perfect for capturing and accurately reporting events that lead to economic loss, like crop injury and reduced health. 

How Can Drones Be Used In Agriculture?

The versatility of drones and their sophisticated sensors enables farmers to utilise the technology for a number of reasons. These include:

• Crop Monitoring: Drones monitor crops accurately and more cheaply than traditional methods and offer key insights into crop development, as well as highlighting inefficient and ineffective practices.
• Soil and Field Analysis: Drones can produce 3D maps, quickly and cheaply, which help farmers make important decisions about seed-planting pattern design and nitrogen-level management, for example.
• Health Assessment: Drones can capture multispectral data to help farmers gather key insights into crop health. Such early intervention is crucial to remedy any issues.
• Irrigation: Drones equipped with monitoring equipment can identify areas of a field experiencing hydric stress (lack of water). Thermal sensors provide crucial information, allowing targeted diagnosis of areas receiving too much or too little water.
• Aerial Planting: Drones can fly over a potential planting zone to monitor the best areas for growth. They can then drop biodegradable pods, filled with seed and nutrients, into the ground.
• Herd Management: Farmers are deploying drones to monitor livestock. In some cases, drones with loudspeakers, like the DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise, are used for animal movement, playing a pre-recorded dog bark. Farmers say this method puts less stress on the herd.
• Crop Spraying: Crops can cover large areas quickly, applying liquids with great precision.
• Insurance: Drones can play a key role in insurance, at both the pre-and-post-claim stage. Using a drone helps for site inspection, claims decisions, fraud prevention, and risk management.

A safe and efficient solution

Agricultural drone spraying is becoming an increasingly popular application, helping to maintain crop health and yields.

Drones are being deployed for spraying for disease, weed, and pest control, as well as spreading pesticides and fertilisers.

Using drones for this application makes sense, offering a fully-automated, targeted and precise solution, and replacing labour-intensive, time-consuming, and potentially harmful use of backpack sprayers and other equipment. 

This method is particularly useful in areas where the terrain is undulating, steep, or hard to access.

Deploying a drone is also a cheaper option than using crop dusters to spray fields too large for manual labour.

Crop spraying drones are particularly prevalent in China, where government subsidies promote the use of agricultural drones. Leading drone manufacturer DJI has responded to this demand by engineering the Agras spraying drones. There are currently more than 40,000 active Agras on the market.           

Spraying drones are not currently legal in the UK, but trials are being conducted to try to change this. Many of these tests are based around bracken growth on inaccessible hillsides in upland areas important for sheep production. The aim is to build a portfolio of evidence to highlight the positive uses of crop-spraying drones and convince decision-makers to allow drone spraying.      

DJI Agras Crop Spraying Drones

High-tech agricultural spraying drones, the DJI Agras series is designed to increase efficiency and manageability of plant protection and fertilisation. 

The Agras T16, for example, features a 16L spray tank and is able to spray 24.7 acres (10 hectares) per hour. This is much faster than manual spraying methods. 

The Agras series can be deployed for a fully-automated, targeted, and precise spraying solution, allowing modern farms to save on labour while maximising coverage and outputs.

For increased efficiency, the Agras series can be used for swarming. Up to five Agras T16 drones can be controlled by a single T16 remote controller, while one Agras MG-1P controller can control up to five MG-1P aircraft simultaneously - doubling the efficiency of single-pilot operations.

crop spraying v manual methods

more information about dji agras

DJI Agras MG-1P

• 10L Spray Tank
• IP67-rated High-Precision Radar
• Active Obstacle Sensing and Avoidance
• 123° FOV Wide Angle FPV Camera
• Multi-Aircraft Control Mode
• Advanced propulsion and control algorithms

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DJI Agras MG RTK 

• 10L Spray Tank
• IP67-rated High-Precision Radar
• RTK Centimetre Level Positioning
• Active Obstacle Sensing and Avoidance
• 123° FOV Wide Angle FPV Camera
• Multi-Aircraft Control Mode

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DJI Agras T16

• 16L Spray Tank
• IP67 Core Module Rating
• RTK Centimeter Level Positioning
• DBF Imaging Radar
• Wide Angle FPV Camera
• AI Engine

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Crop Spraying Drones v Manual Methods

Using drones for crop spraying is a far more efficient and cost-effective process than manual methods. 

The table below shows the benefits of using a DJI Agras MG-1P, which has a 10L spray tank. The time-savings are even greater with an Agras T16, which has a larger 16L spray tank.  

Information That Can't Be Seen With The Naked Eye

Crop inspection is a vital part of farming and a drone can be deployed to capture fast, accurate, and meaningful insights.

Drones can carry a combination of zoom, thermal, multispectral, NDVI, and visual cameras to draw precise data which cannot be seen with the naked eye, or is difficult to collect from ground level. 

Best Drones For Crop Inspection

As the world's leading drone manufacturer, DJI has a number of solutions to help farmers collect vital insights about crop health and vegetation management.   

The Phantom 4 Multispectral is a dedicated drone for precision agriculture, enabling agricultural professionals to capture plant-level data.

The drone features a built-in imaging system comprising 1 RGB camera and a multispectral camera with five sensors covering the blue, green, red, red edge and near-infrared bands.

Users can switch between NDVI images and the live RGB feed to highlight attention areas and enable targeted treatment decisions.

The Phantom 4 Multispectral benefits from RTK accuracy, while the DJI TimeSync system allows for accurate positioning data on images captured by the cameras.

This enables farmers to make timely and informed decisions on crop treatment and health, which lowers costs, saves on resources, and helps to maximise yields.

The DJI Matrice M300 RTK is another reliable option for farmers. While not strictly an agricultural drone, the M300 RTK can be integrated with different payloads to capture key farming insights, including the H20T camera which boasts thermal and zoom capabilities. Thermal imaging has a range of applications in agriculture, such as irrigation scheduling, detecting plant disease, and estimating fruit yields, while a zoom camera can be used to hone in on specific areas. 

The DJI Matrice 300 RTK can also be integrated with third-party payloads, enabling farmers to pair the drone with dedicated and specialist NDVI and multispectral sensors. 

Meanwhile, the DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Series offers a lightweight, foldable and portable option for farmers. The standard Mavic 2 Enterprise features a dynamic zoom camera, while the Mavic 2 Enterprise Dual comes with thermal capabilities. Both drones can carry modular accessories, such as a loudspeaker, spotlight, and beacon, to add versatility to agricultural missions.      

DJI Phantom 4 Multispectral

• 5-Camera Array covering Blue, Green, Red, Red Edge and NIR (Near Infrared), plus an RGB sensor
• Integrated Spectral Sunlight Sensor for Increased Accuracy
• Live RGB and NDVI Feed Available from the Drone
• Integrated RTK for 1-cm Accuracy
• 27 Minute Flight Time
• 7km Transmission Range

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DJI M300 RTK

• Up to 55 minute flight time.
• IP45 weather-resistance rating.
• Carry up to three payloads at once.
• H20T camera, built for the M300 RTK, is a multi-sensor solution, including thermal and zoom.
• Integrate specialist third-party multispectral and NDVI sensors. 
• Enhanced safety features and flight redundancy.

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DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Series

• Mavic 2 Enterprise has a 12MP camera with 2x optical and 3x digital zoom capabilities.
• Mavic 2 Enterprise Dual has thermal and standard RGB sensors.
• Lightweight, foldable, easily transportable, and quick to deploy.
• 24GB onboard storage
• Omnidirectional object sensing

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Digitise Your Field

Drone mapping is becoming a key tool for farmers.

Digitising your field helps to maximise operational efficiency and monitor crop production, plant breeding, irrigation, and animal damage. 

Drone mapping provides better insights into crops from above, serving as the foundation for work on the ground. 

Turn images into insightful maps which can help with decision-making and can be shared quickly. 

Drone mapping also provides the chance to set pre-determined flight paths for autonomous missions and repeatable and accurate data collection. 

Drone mapping can provide the following insights:

• Field Inspection: Identify issues with quick-to-create, high-resolution maps. 
• Irrigation: Manage irrigation and minimise soil erosion by creating a digital surface model. This helps farmers understand irrigation variability and highlight areas at risk of erosion.
• Field Interpretation: Analyse different vegetation index maps to identify key crop areas that need to be addressed and ensure the sustainability of new techniques.
• Targeted Analysis: Generate comprehensive zone maps to identify how to achieve increased yields. 
• Insurance Claims: Create maps to validate and sustain insurance claims by capturing footprints of your crop damage. 
• Historical Analysis: Compare side-by-side maps to track a crop’s progress over time. This enables you to dig deeper into problem areas, take a closer look at patterns, and visualise how crop
  emergence and plant health played out through the entire growing season. 

Best Drones For Farm Mapping

The DJI Phantom 4 RTK is an ideal drone for agricultural mapping.

The Phantom 4 RTK performs aerial mapping 100 times faster than manual operations, helping to scan and map target areas to identify all aspects of a field. 

Benefits of the DJI Phantom 4 RTK include:

• Capture quality image data with one-inch 20MP CMOS sensor. The mechanical shutter makes mapping missions or regular data capture seamless, taking pictures without the risk of shutter blur. 
• Achieve survey-grade results with greater efficiency.
• RTK module provides real-time centimetre-level positioning data for improved absolute accuracy of image metadata.
• TimeSync system continually aligns the flight controller, camera, and RTK module. 
• Compatible with DJI Terra and other drone mapping software. 

Which Eye In The Sky Should You Use?

Drones are more efficient and more effective for farming than manual methods. But how do they compare to satellites?  

In truth, both have their advantages, and come down to the specific application. 

However, there are certain times when drones have the advantage. 

Take cloud cover, for example. Satellite imagery can be severely affected by cloud cover, limiting what can be seen. A drone, on the other hand, can fly closer to the earth, below the cover of cloud, to obtain the data you need. 

There's also the issue of satellites flying around the earth within a certain time. If you want immediate data capture, it can be best to deploy a drone.  

Because drones can fly closer to the ground, they can collect extremely precise data, taking shots to distinguish a weed or a crop, or show each particular plant. Because of its distance from the earth, a satellite can't capture that level of detail. 

However, if high-precision is not a priority, then satellites can have the advantage, especially over big farms where they can cover a larger area. 

Thanks to their wide scope, the collected image is complete, eliminating the need for image stitching. In contrast, because drone shots capture smaller areas, image stitching is needed following drone flights. 

Another advantage of using satellites is that their records go further back. Thanks to this archive data, you can time travel and build a longer picture of your farm.  

But, while the drones versus satellite question is valid, it doesn't always have to be a choice between the two.  Rather, using them together can be extremely useful, spotting an initial problem through a satellite and then deploying a drone to hone in on the issue and tackle it precisely and quickly.    

Evaluate Crops - Quickly and Efficiently

To help promote drones for agriculture, Heliguy has partnered with UAS farming company, DroneAG.

UK-based Drone AG has created Skippy Scout, an award-winning real-time crop monitoring tool designed to make farmers’ lives easier by saving time, increasing efficiency and providing accurate results.