More On Utilizing Drones

Within the next few months we may see the FAA begin loosening their regulations regarding the use of drones for agricultural use. Hermann Thoennissen, President of HTC International says the technology is coming along including the imaging of new cameras. You can acquire a lot of data.

THOENNISSEN: The single most important aspect is now you've got all the data, how do you analyze them? You need somebody to help you interpret this and then you need to extract agronomic information and then you need to present what you extract to those people who put that into action.

A whole gamut of information can be gathered from a variety of images.

THOENNISSEN: In the past we farmed basically on an anecdotal basis. Grandpa told us this; dad tells me this. I don't listen to dad, I do it anyway. Over time we have gotten into the science of agronomy and horticulture and we have used some principals to go into it and now we are actually quite a ways into precision agriculture and the step we rally need to go into is ag data management and ag data management systems.

Thoennissen says it's crucial to have data that you can use.

THOENNISSEN: We have all lost data. We have data which is isolated and we can't find. We all have inaccurate data . We have incomplete data. Data are fragmented, we can get them together. And then my favorite one is; yeah I got the data but in a format that I can't extract. You have to be able to put all the data into one place where you can extract them, use them and ten interpret them correctly and analyze them.

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.