Farmers have another tool that will help them with their crops.
Using a smartphone, farmers will be able to fly drones and accomplish everything from watering to inspecting plant health. And with smarter software, drones can become more autonomous, making the process more efficient and at a much lower cost.
While manufacturers have been offering "agricultural" drones to the market for two decades, the response has been small globally.
It is estimated that only 2 percent of farmers in China use drones for their crops, partly due to lower awareness but also because the technology has not been that user-friendly until now.
But now, with autonomous UAVs and smartphone apps, everything has been simplified. To use a drone, farmers simply need to draw the shape of their crops on their phone and the drone will do the rest – including returning to the base station.
For farmers who already know how to fly a drone, they can go a step further and analyze the data collected about their plantations.
Poladrone is a Malaysian startup that makes software to analyze palm oil plantations. By looking at images taken from above, it can count the number of palm trees, determine the health of the crops, and alert farmers if it detects blocked paths.
Founder Jinxi Cheong explained that image recognition software can understand the health of plants based on factors such as the color of their leaves.
With new techniques, farmers can make their lives easier and achieve better yields at lower costs.
