Farming With Drones..Beyond Just Pictures

I'm Susan Allen here is more from my conversation with Patrick Williams Tech Manager and precision ag specialist for Simplot on drones and potatoes. I've invited him to share with you a project he is working on that will use drones in a novel way to help farmers grow a better potato

WILLIAMS: We are also looking at new technologies like drones for applications beyond just pictures that we can use to analyze the field. I'm working on a project right now with a couple different companies to use data from the drones to count the number of plants within a field. So we will be able to count every single potato plant. Then we have problems with the planter who didn't put enough potatoes in an area or maybe we had a problem with germination, soy some of that potato seed died we would then be able to measure the impact of that and get a better idea of how it would affect the field economically.

What about blight, we have some farmers reporting conditions, does this work with that?

WILLIAMS: We will start to see pockets of it, the weather has been fairly mild so I don't know that it's a huge issue with it ye but we will continue to monitor it, we will watch it with different types of imagery and we will try to measure the locations and the impact of that.

What an exciting time to be in agriculture