Droning On

Droning On

Droning On. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture.

Drone. They are hot properties right now. The military has been using drones for quite some time and now the rest of the business world has been trying to figure out how to incorporate them. Amazon wants to deliver packages using drones. But the one industry that could ultimately benefit the most from utilizing drones is agriculture. Dr. Deon van der Merwe is a Kansas State University professor says drones and that technology have come a long way.

VAN DER MERWE: The use of drones has matured in the last couple of years because of the maturation of technology that's necessary to make these systems work. Ten years ago a person trying to do this would have had to basically come up with a lot of the solutions to how to fly an airplane, how to get data from the sensors on the airplane and so on. You would have to reinvent the wheel day after day after day and pay very high prices for the technology that were available at that time.

Fortunately, he says that most of those big issues have been solved.

VAN DER MERWE: Cameras have come a long way in the last ten years. So now days you can have a very high quality sensors on an aircraft for a relatively low price. And methods for converting consumer grade cameras to the type of camera that gives you valuable information about plant health has come a long way as well.

The other part of the equation is the amount of data collected and what to do with it.

That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.

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