10/23/07 Crop Cam Part 2

Crop Cam Part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. I'm fascinated by technology and when you can take something as low-tech as farming and incorporate high-tech methods it is all the more exciting. Robert Blair is a farmer in North Central Idaho, he's also CEO of Pine Creek Precision and he had a need. He wanted to see his whole field at one time to see what was going on so he created Crop Cam a military drone plane with a digital camera on board. BLAIR: What Pine Creek Precision is doing is we are taking the unmanned air vehicle; we are doing research and actually using Crop Cam to take pictures of our fields. And from those pictures we can identify weeds, animal damage; we can hopefully identify insect damage and disease in our crops as they're growing. Blair says the uses of Crop Cam are many but one problem recently came up on his land. BLAIR: Here where I'm at (with) my garbanzo beans we had severe elk damage through the drought  there was nothing to eat in the canyon so they decided my garbanzo's were pretty tasty and did a lot of damage. About a thousand pounds in areas and more and we are able to quantify that and hopefully get some reimbursement from Fish & Game. A software program puts all the individual photos together so you wind up with a complete picture of your fields. Blair says they are looking at some higher tech upgrades to Crop Cam. BLAIR: We're looking at using a modified camera to do the near-infrared and we're also looking at developing different information gathering devices; either thermal imaging or other ways to gather the information that might be needed which would cost more money in the long run but there are applications where maybe off-the-shelf is not good enough, we need a little higher end stuff. The cost of Crop Cam is about $11-thousand dollars which when you compare it to hiring one fly-over is inexpensive and it can quickly pay for itself. BLAIR: Two years ago I paid $6 an acre to fly my farm and I farm 15-hundred acres and that cost me about $9000. Well for $11-thousand dollars I own Crop Cam and can fly my own field whenever I want. Matter of fact, its paid for itself this year in the images I've been able to capture. It's invaluable. Training is included in the cost of Crop Cam so there is no guess work. Visit their website at www.pinecreekprecision.com. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.