Agriculture Drones: A Skilled Tool for Conserving and Improving Agricultural Needs for Future

From the past few years, the agricultural industry has been growing at a faster pace. With the growing population, there always remains pressure on farmers to produce good food and to remain sustainable. However, in this new era of agriculture, farmers are able to use various new technology-based devices such as sensing devices with GPS facilities, steering, and remote sensing devices, as well as high-tech farm management software. This enables agricultural professionals to do precision farming and to adopt a new methodology to bring revolutionary changes into farming.

Agricultural drones are one of the major components in precision farming, which are widely in use nowadays to optimize productivity by extracting out real-time field information. This also causes huge profit by guiding farmers to invest how much on crops and plantation and other factors and also helps to protect cultivating land from every adverse condition. Before moving forward to know more about the major advantages of agricultural drones, let’s start with some fundamentals first.

What are Agricultural Drones?

Drones are also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which have no human body boarded on them. They are quite small in size and are weighing a maximum of up to 20kgs. Drones have multiple ranges of applications in precision farming. It helps in mapping or surveying, crop-dusting or spraying, and many other applications.

There are types of drones that are widely used in farming. One is completely controlled by a human being with the help of a remote and the other one is autonomous, where the drone is able to control itself and can follow the desired path with the help of GPS or other sensors.

Key Advantages of Agricultural Drones

Agricultural drones have numerous benefits in modern farming. Here, are some major benefits of using agricultural drones in the new farming techniques:

• Drones are mounted with standard cameras to capture both still images and video footage.
• They are widely used for routine checkups and inspections after natural calamities like floods, frosts, or fire events.
• They help in providing relevant information at critical times by inspecting land before harvesting, checking the fences, spraying insecticides, fulfilling irrigation requirements, and also gives accurate data of livestock.
• They help agricultural professionals to make decisions for replanting in parts or in a whole new part of the land.
• Drones help in crop scouting without entering into the paddock. It performs a visual assessment of crops and sends detailed conditions of the crops to the professionals to take needful decisions. 
• They save time and perform every activity very effectively and potentially and help to overcome many constraints such as gaining access to paddocks just after calamities.

What is the Wide Range of Applications of Agricultural Drones?

Usually, drones collect raw data which are later translated using algorithms into valuable information. Therefore, they are used in numerous applications which helps to farm to get improved with greater monitoring ability. Here, are some major parameters of agricultural drones:

• Drones can assess the greenness or photosynthetic biomass activity of plants
• They can check crop health like, damage caused by pests or color change due to some infections
• They can even measure the plant’s height and density
• They can perform plant scouting with plot statistics, stand numbers, and considering many other factors
• They can perform soil analysis by checking the availability of nutrients in the soil
• They also can identify the maturity of crops by considering the ripeness of the crops
• They even warn for irrigation facility wherever required by checking the condition of the land.

The Future Landscape of Agriculture Drone Market

Though the outbreak of novel coronavirus has devastated several industries. However, it has a positive impact on the global agricultural drones market.Most of the agricultural industries have started adopting precision farming during the pandemic because of the high demand for food supply. The rising need for funding for agricultural drones due to their effectiveness is the major factor driving the global agricultural drones market. The market is anticipated to grow at a high CAGR of 19.2% by generating revenue of $6,244.5 million in the 2021–2028 timeframe.

The Bottom Line

The growing demand for good quality food supply and increasing rate of consumption will make agriculture professionals work more on adopting precision farming on a large scale. This will enhance the production and usage of agricultural drones at a greater pace. In near future, the agriculture sector will become more advanced, sustainable with positive and desirable outcomes.    

About the Author(s)

Princy A. J

Princy holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the prestigious Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. University at Chennai, India. After a successful academic record, she pursued her passion for writing. A thorough professional and enthusiastic writer, she enjoys writing on various categories and advancements in the global industries. She plays an instrumental role in writing about current updates, news, blogs, and trends.