As the farming industry continues to modernize and turn to automation, the role and importance of drones are exploding in the industry – so much so that the agricultural drone market is supposed to quadruple in value in just four short years.
The report, "Agriculture Drone Market: Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Segment, Trends and Forecast, 2015 – 2021," was recently released by Zion Research and valued the 2015 agricultural drone market at $673 million, with that figure expected to grow to $2.9 billion in 2021.
The report notes that the increasing reliance on automation to increase efficiency, mitigate labor costs, and produce analyses that result in greater yields have all drawn farmers to the technology. In addition, their versatility is a huge boon, allowing them to carry a variety of sensors that can provide precision data on crops. I myself got to play with one such solution, DroneDeploy, this summer and was quite impressed. I also think it's great to see drones being put to good use to make the lives of farmers a bit easier and more productive. One downside the report noted is that the lack of trained pilots is expected to slow growth, so if you have a drone and the gumption, perhaps now is the time to get into the market!
[via Drone Life]
They are already here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=T7Os5Okf3OQ
And franckly, "land" drones are more likely to be mainstream than flying ones. Let's face it, farming is a ground activity...
That is awesome and is super helpful for the average farmer, I imagine. But in this case, drones are best used for spraying. Using planes is the go-to (or has been until now), but that's obviously much more expensive than hypothetically being able to put up a several-thousand-dollar drone and operate it from the ground...
It's the same food poisoning but now looks fancier. It's not for improving the food quality. It's just for lowering the expenses for poisoning.
Our food, in the US, is safer than it has ever been...at least according to science and statistics.
There's nothing wrong about lowering expenses for farmers. They don't feed our families because it makes them rich. They receive pennies on the dollar for what we buy in the store.
As someone who works in the ag community and has spent my career photographing it, Farmers often use drones to estimate crop yields for the year and plan out hedging contracts, look for potential pests, identify potential nutrient deficiencies in crops, find livestock, monitor grazing lands, have fun, and a million other uses that makes these family farms more efficient. Making lives easier for the 1.8 percent of the (US) population that is directly tied to food production is a good thing.
The main use for drones in the ag industry is imaging and mapping. Your autonomous tractor needs to have a good lay of the land and the farmer needs to know what's going on and doing that with drones is the best way. CNH has a partnership with DroneDeploy which is the software for flying, capturing imagery and processing that into a 3d map of your farm