Instantaneous Tassel Counts

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

For technology to be useful in agriculture, it must be timely. Agronomist Matt Larson says he has had issues in the past with some technologies giving him information when it’s too late to take the necessary action.

Larson… “We've relied on outside sources or somebody else flying an airplane. They might, you know, they fly it every couple of weeks. We get a data dump, you know, and then a week's gone by. And then we go out and look at it and you know, it could be anywhere from three to seven to ten days before we get the information. And this is just instantaneous.”

He’s talking about FieldAgent, a product of Sentera, which allows a member of his team to fly fields with a drone to get that instantaneous data. They’ve found use for this technology in performing stand counts and tassel counts in corn.

Larson… “When we go late season and those tassels are emerged. And we can go out there and fly a field and we get the same report back that says what the tassel counts are instead of a stand count, they're very, very accurate. But on the computer, I can sit down with that grower and I can click on a section of that field and I can see the corn standing there. You can zoom all the way in to see where they're picking up the tassel accounts, what the issues are. All that stuff. And I just absolutely love that piece of it. And we can do the same thing on the stand counts early, you know, we can click on it and zoom in and physically look at the corn that the drone's counting. It's neat.”

Larson says this type of visibility helps him build trust with his farmer customers.