Significant investments of time, energy, and financial resources are lately directed to the potential uses of Unmanned Aerial Systems for production row crop agriculture.  UAS is the general term referring to the actual UAV or unmanned aerial vehicle, analytics software, and flight automation systems.    Opinions vary, but prognosticators estimate that the UAS industry will contribute $82 billion to the US economy, about $75.6 billion directly related to the agriculture sector, while employing as many as 100,000 in the next 10-15 years.  

So the question arises - will growers realize a reciprocal return? Here are a few things to consider as we try to understand the utility and ROI of UAS in row crops.

If any of you have been so fortunate to have thumbed a ride with a local pilot to get that bird’s eye view of your growing crop, or even more interesting, your neighbor’s crop, you understand that there are certainly many variables to observe from this perspective; some are explainable, some are not.  You have probably observed that all your neighbors’ fields have patterns, and most of the time you can observe those field patterns evolve into trends from field to field, based on environment, management style or lack thereof. As you ask the pilot to make one more pass around that 80 acres, you just cannot seem to take it all in or take enough pictures to establish that CSI, (Crop Scene Investigation) of what is really happening with your growing crop, much less redirect your ground “truth-ing” or scouting trips back to that certain area of interest. Somewhat like your experience in the airplane, UAV’s or unmanned aerial vehicles can perform a more or less virtual crop survey, capture geo-referenced digital images that has the potential to be more meaningful to your crop management decision making, at a fraction of the cost of a manned aircraft.

There are at least 2 common platforms used as UAV’s depending on the mission objectives, scope, and scale of workload. A Multi-rotor or lifting body can carry various payloads of cameras and sensors but has critical mission limitations of duration of flight and area covered based on battery life and true flight envelope of only about 15-20 minutes. If the goal of the flight is simply to work field by field and capture digital images of different crop phases, stresses, field scale crop conditions, the multi-rotors might be the platform of choice. When the mission is to cover multiple acres per flight, map fields with geo-referenced digital images that range from true color to multi-spectral images a fixed wing UAV that has a flight duration envelope of 45-60 minutes may be the platform of choice.

Aside from choosing the appropriate flight platform, the real differentiator between the literally hundreds if not thousands of UAS vendors is the analysis software used to handle all of the complex and voluminous amount of data that is captured during the flight. The question eventually arises, can I extrapolate information from the high tech geo-referenced images captured as a functional layer of data that is useful information and accurately transferable to ground based operations to either correct or to mitigate factors relative to crop performance? Stated another way, is current technology capable of identifying a symptom in a field with false color composites such as NDVI (vegetative indices used to differentiate between vigorous growth and stress symptom of the crop) and precisely interpret these images to make a replant decision or a nitrogen recommendation or estimate yield? 

Frankly these are the questions that remain to be realized for agriculture at this point, but it is truly exciting technology, and theory that begs an opportunity to prove to be a viable tool at the farm gate. As you have heard it said….; “We don’t know what we don’t know” at this point and one should move forward as well-informed with a cautiously optimistic perspective of short term outcome.