10/22/07 Getting A Good Look

Getting A Good Look. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Standing at the edge of your fields you can only get a very small idea of what is happening throughout your crop. Even if you wade into the crop itself, you still only get a very small picture. But what if you could see the whole field? Sure, you can hire a photographer in a plane or spend more on satellite images. Robert Blair with Pine Creek Precision has a solution called Crop Cam. BLAIR: Crop Cam is what's called a UAS, an unmanned air system. It is basically a military drone, has an autopilot, has preprogrammed flight paths, after you launch it  it flies itself and then it will land itself. The drone has an on-board camera that takes a series of pictures and according to Blair that allows you to get a look at your entire field, not just a few square feet. BLAIR: From those pictures we can identify weeds, we can identify animal damage, we hopefully can identify insect damage and disease in our crops as they are growing and so now there is a year long picture; a record  a photographic picture of your crops through the growing season. The Crop Cam also has software that puts all the pictures together for a complete picture of your field. BLAIR: We can cover a square mile  a section in about 25 minutes. It does take some time to stitch it, you do have to have a computer with some capacity to run the images because it does take up memory. Once you have the images there you can look at it, you're covering your whole field unlike crop advisors and scouts, you go out and farmers themselves, ride on a 4-wheeler or walk out you're not seeing the whole picture. Owning a Crop Cam has big benefits over hiring a fly-over. BLAIR: Conventional aircraft you're looking at a two-day or longer turn around, satellites you're limited to cloud cover. They come around in a set pattern and so being able to get that timely image, well if it's cloudy out you can't see through the clouds so here were able to get the images when the farmer needs it. Tomorrow well look at some specific uses and cost for the Crop Cam. Visit their website at www.pinecreekprecision.com. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.