Ag & Drones Part 3
Ag & Drones Part 3. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture.
Dr. Deon van der Merwe is a Kansas State University professor who has done extensive work with drones in agriculture and says that this technology can really improve profitability. He also sees very few, if any downsides.
VAN DER MERWE: When you do a more precise, more appropriate application of chemicals, fertilizers and other chemicals like pesticides then the environmental impact is less as well so you can make more profit but you can also lessen your ecological footprint and negative impacts while not reducing your yield.
He says there are also other benefits to the use of drones and the information gathered.
VAN DER MERWE: This is going to have a lot of impact in our ability to accelerate the breeding of crops because you can predict things much more efficiently so if you have an experimental field where you are doing breeding experiments to develop new varieties you can essentially detect those plants that you need to continue with in just a fraction of the time compared to what it takes with traditional ground based methods.
And Van der Merwe says this is also effective for livestock production.
VAN DER MERWE: There we're talking about vast amounts of pastures and the question there is always how can we more efficiently manage those pastures to optimize production and one of the key things there to understand how much biomass you have available in a pasteur.
That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
