Farmers are starting to investigate the use of drones for a decidedly nonmilitary purpose: monitoring crops and spraying pesticides.
As the spring growing season unfolds, universities already are working with agricultural groups to experiment with different types of unmanned aircraft outfitted with sensors and other technologies to measure and protect crop health.
Oregon State University plans to use the unmanned vehicles to monitor the school's potato crop and those of a commercial potato grower. Both crops, located near Hermiston, Ore., are expected to sprout in coming weeks. The university last month ran its first test-flight.
Oregon State is one of several universities that have begun research projects to investigate the use of the unmanned aerial vehicles in agriculture. Drones are the latest development in a movement known as precision agriculture, which uses technology such as global positioning systems, sensors and iPads to more accurately monitor fields.
Growers can run analytics on data generated by sensors and drones to quickly find problems such as specific plants not getting enough water. Flown by a pilot on the ground, aircraft equipped with infrared cameras can take a close look at the health of plants to help growers determine whether they need water, are suffering from insect infestation or need additional fertilizer.
The Federal Aviation Administration is set to establish guidelines for using such aircraft by September 2015. Once that happens, the industry is expected to generate more than 21,000 jobs during the following 12 months, according to a March report by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Until then farmers in the U.S. can only use these drones if they are participating in research with a university.
Today, this type of monitoring is done by manned planes and sometimes satellites. "The biggest problem in the past with aerial imagery in agriculture is that everything is time-sensitive, and with unmanned aerial vehicles we'd be able to process that data much more quickly," said Steve Cubbage, president of Prime Meridian, a company that sells precision agriculture data services to growers. Instead of scheduling a plane, which could take longer owing to the time required to make arrangements with the local airport, drones would be lower-cost and able to operate even if there was cloud cover, he said.
The drones, some as small as eight pounds, can be put into the air on-demand, but because of the complexity of flying them, farmers will likely hire a company to provide the service.
"This technology should provide an opportunity to see parts of the field even down to the leaf level," said Phil Hamm, director of the Hermiston Agricultural Research and Extension Center at Oregon State University.
At Oregon State, the potato crop at the university was chosen because it is a highly valued product and expensive to raise. Farmers in the area spend about $4,000 or more per acre to raise the crop, or about $500,000 for the average-size field. Growers in the area have been quick to adopt technology that will help them lower costs and improve yields. "We're the most technologically advanced growing area in the world," said Mr. Hamm.
Oregon State will use two types of unmanned aerial vehicles that will be equipped with cameras. The HawkEye from Tetracam Inc. of Chatsworth, Calif., is a rectangular frame with a specialized video camera, a motor and propeller that weighs eight pounds and is attached to a large parachute. The other aircraft, called Unicorn from Lockheed Martin Corp.'s LMT +0.55%Procerus Technologies, looks like a glider. Mr. Hamm doesn't think these should be called drones because farmers will use them solely for monitoring their own crops and not for military or law-enforcement purposes.
Yet, companies like Bosh Precision Agriculture LLC, of Newport News, Va., are actually repurposing drones built for the military and equipping them with a camera that can take images of crops outside the visible spectrum, showing infrared light. The infrared light that is reflected by a plant shows how efficiently photosynthesis occurs in that plant and can provide insight into its general health. By 2050, there will be an estimated nine billion people on the planet, and farmers will need to produce larger yields, said Young Kim, general manager of Bosh Precision Agriculture. "There are very few young people that go into farming and we have an aging farming population," he said. Technology can be an answer to both those problems, he said.
Meantime, Oregon State and other universities are putting unmanned aircraft to the test. The University of California, Davis is testing small helicopter-like vehicles for the targeted spraying of pesticides in hard-to-reach hillsides in vineyards. Researchers at Kansas State University are creating precise maps of nitrogen deficiencies in soil to help farmers apply fertilizer where it is needed most. A team at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University is using the aircraft to detect microbes in the atmosphere that may cause plant diseases.
In Oregon, researchers will look at research plots of potatoes that are artificially under-watered and under-fertilized to see how quickly the aircraft can pick up those details. "We want to know whether the cameras associated with these vehicles are more sensitive than the naked eye," said Mr. Hamm.
Eventually, farmers will likely depend on third parties to analyze the data and images received by drones. These services may send growers real-time updates about specific problems drones find in the field such as new insect infestations or dry patches, said Mr. Hamm.
"Any way that growers can potentially maximize yields and quality, that is money in their pockets," said Mr. Hamm.
