There has been a lot of hype about drones in the past couple years not just because of Amazon’s plans to use drones for their food deliveries, but also due to society’s use of them for recreational fun. Looking past the use of drones as mail men and the thrill of seeing them fly around parks and beaches, there is another reason drones are becoming a valuable asset- farming. Drones are being used on farms to get an aerial view of crops, relaying data back to the farmer about the quality of the crops and alerting them of any issues.
These drones are becoming an extremely helpful tool in the farming industry as many farms can be quite large. With crops averaging about 400 acres it can be very difficult to spot areas that may be in need of pesticides or more water. With drones farmers can see their farms in a way they never could before, with drones covering multiple acres every few minutes, farmers can get a much better understanding of the state of their crops in a much faster fashion. Some drones can even sense the moisture in the crops, showing farmers which areas need more water than others.
Now that farmers have this type of big data at their fingertips it is making their job much more efficient. Even better news is that these drones are simple, they are created to not be terribly difficult so that they do not require an analytics team to operate them. A farmer can simply fly the drone over his crops and then put the data into an program on his computer that analyzes athe data and prints out results of its findings.
Even though there is a lot of push back about drones and privacy and what not, it is nice to know that they are also being used for good, helping those who work hard to feed the people of our nation. To learn more about how Big Data is working in the food industry check out this interesting article on what happens when Data Science Meets Food!
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