Revolutionising plant trials with drone automation - Drone Ag

Drone Ag Trials Plot Automation

By Nicholas Allen

DroneAg, the farmers who know drones, have recently been successfully bid for Innovate UK funding to bring end-to-end drone automation to one of the main bottlenecks of modern agriculture: field trials for research and development, as identified by agricultural giants Agrii, UPL and Eurofins agro, to name a few.

Climate change is tearing up the rule book when it comes to how we’ve grown crops for the past hundred years. Droughts and torrential rain, heatwaves and unpredictable frosts, hurricanes, and soil loss, are all becoming more common, and often worse. Plant breeders, geneticists, biologists, and chemists are working on solutions, and coming up with new traits, varieties, or chemicals to deal with these. They have to do this all whilst using fewer chemicals overall to address biological and ecological concerns.?

These necessities for the industry come at a time when the global population is set to reach 10B in the next few decades and will come with the demands of an increasingly middle-class global population.?

Across the agricultural spectrum, new products are backed up with rigorous science. Data to evaluate the efficacy of a new product is critical if it is to succeed, and companies spend billions to do so, increasingly using technology to help them.?

As it stands, to get something commercially ready, findings in the lab need to undergo stringent tests and validation to go from lab to field, the key enabler being trials. Trials come in many forms and are performed by multiple actors.?

Variety trials evaluate how different varieties of the same crop grown in the same way, play out over the growing season with their different genetics. Another form is input trials where new input products can be tested, sometimes in new combinations with different adjuvants, which can change absorption, how well it is incorporated into leaves, how it mixes, or simply finding the optimum concentration.?

Trials are carried out both by the companies testing their own product such as UPL, and third-party contracted trial companies such as Scottish Agronomy or Eurofins Agro. Finally, farmers may want independent results so will come together to organise independent trials of products and varieties which are collated and distributed to member farmers so they can make well-informed decisions on the crops and inputs they wish to use in the growing season.?

The amount of money going into ag tech continues to grow. Biologicals, enzymes, bacteria, genetic engineering, and AI are all revolutionising the way food is conceptualised, yet they all still require tests in the fields, on farms they will grow in at scale.?

Trial plots are often used to test multiple replicates of treatments or varieties to check they can work in the field as well as the lab.?

It is essential that trials are performed in a representative sample of climates, soil types and growing conditions. Guaranteeing this involves trials in disparate locations, often geographically isolated from one another which means trial technicians, whose job it is to check on the crops at regular intervals, spend the growing season traveling up and down the country to keep an eye on development and report results.

Results will be collated and combined into analysed products which allow for a comparison with lab results. From this, scientists can see how effective their product is at delivering the objective in different settings and can adapt accordingly.?

Drones have increasingly been used in the past decade to monitor trials to save time and get measures of plant health such as NDVI. Unfortunately for the technicians flying these, they still map and stitch together hundreds of photos requiring hours of processing, only to cut this large mosaic into individual plots to get individual measurements.?

In the UK most drones have to have a remote pilot on-site, but licenses are allowing for remote automated flights in low-risk areas such as farms. Our vision is to deploy a drone base station on site, and eventually on farms anywhere which the drone can fly from. This “drone home” will allow it to be kept safe from the weather, recharge and upload data to the cloud for instant processing.?

By adapting Skippy flight control software together with new plot identification algorithms we will be able to speed up the process significantly and get more meaningful metrics from our crop AI into the right hands quicker.?

If this solution is of interest to you, register your interest here.

If you are involved in trials in any way, consider answering a few questions.

To find out more, try Skippy Scout or purchase a drone, get in touch here.