Drones are generating a lot of buzz as crop scouting tools, but farmers may actually get better information from a higher flying machine. An airplane can capture high resolution photographs over a much larger area than a small, battery-powered drone can fly, said Bill Verbeten, owner of Empire Ag Imagery, based in Buffalo, N.Y. If airplanes are like a massive, brand-new planter, “drones are more like a two-row planter,” Verbeten told attendees of last month’s Corn and Soybean Winter Congress at the Grantville Holiday Inn. Both airplanes and drones operated for commercial purposes — such as managing crops — must be flown by someone with a pilot’s license, Verbeten said. “There are not policemen running around chasing you down over this,” but if the drone has an accident, your insurance company will disavow you, said Joe Sommer, a Penn State mechanical engineering professor. Verbeten’s company usually flies planes one to three days per week. One of his pilots may photograph a few thousand acres in less than a day, ranging all over western New York from Binghamton to Buffalo. Planes can photograph fields in either sun or complete clouds. Partial cloud cover creates shadows that garble the imagery, Verbeten said. To designate which fields are to be mapped, a farmer can simply provide the nearest road intersection. Verbeten’s team then organizes the farms into a flight plan based on map coordinates. The planes’ cameras take hundreds of pictures at a resolution high enough to detect an iPhone from 1,000 feet above, Verbeten said. Aerial imaging is often used to scout for problems with crop growth, whether caused by mechanical malfunction, spray damage, nutrient shortage or hail. A rectangular dead area may indicate a problem with seed drop in that area, while a spidery break through the field may indicate a drainage issue, Verbeten said. “Aerial imagery will never replace a crop scout,” but it can make an agronomist better, Verbeten said. Photos of bare soil can map tile lines and erosion, Verbeten said. Aerial imaging can be used to count plant populations, particularly in vegetable crops. One image in California counted 806,856 tomato plants in a field and was accurate within 0.8 percent, Verbeten said. In an aerial photograph, only the area directly below the camera is seen exactly from above. Everything else is seen at a slight angle. A computer programs processes these images to show everything from the top, Verbeten said. Cameras can take photos using sophisticated types of color receptivity. In an NDVI image, for example, plants show up in different colors depending on how healthy they are. “If it affects crop health, you can probably measure it with NDVI,” Verbeten said. Verbeten is trying to develop an imaging tool that will measure soil organic matter. In New York, Empire’s services cost $3 to $5 per acre per flight. Verbeten gives custom quotes for Pennsylvania flights. Though airplanes have their advantages, drone technology is getting better. Older cameras that produced distorted images have been replaced by newer, more natural pictures, Sommer, the Penn State professor, said. If the operator takes his hands off the controls, the drone will hover in place, guided by GPS. “They will hold station in 20 mile-per-hour winds,” Sommer said. Farmers can design and save GPS-keyed flight plans, so a drone can fly the same path again and again, Sommer said. Drone batteries still only last about 25 minutes, long enough to inspect about 50 acres on a charge. Drone payloads top out around 2 pounds, so their usefulness is mostly limited to photography, Sommer said. “We’re not going to send this out to spray nitrogen,” Sommer said. The challenge with aerial images, whether from a plane or drone, is how to act on the information they present. A farmer probably will not replant a small flooded patch in the middle of a field, Sommer said. Source - lancasterfarming.com