“UAVs for UK Agriculture: Creating an Invisible Precision Farming Technology” - White paper
Mark Jarman
Consultant | AgriTech | Innovation | Food systems | Ecosystem builder | UK + LATAM
This white paper from the Satellite Applications Catapult looks at how unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies can become an integral or ‘invisible’ precision farming technology exploitable by different users across the agricultural sector. UAV technology has not yet reached maturity, with many agricultural end-users failing to see any proven agronomic or economic benefits of the technology or data products.
The challenge, therefore, is to address the current status of how these systems are being exploited and to address this alongside other regulatory, operational and analytical developments. By doing so, UAVs can become an essential farming tool, both as imaging sources and as farming machines (for example as drone sprayers), in the same way that we associate farms with machines such as tractors, or enabling technologies such as real time kinematic (RTK) navigation.
By exploring the plans for the UK Government RPAS ‘Pathfinder’ projects and the current UAV landscape within agriculture, this white paper will consider how the identified enablers across four identified areas – Systems, Infrastructure and Platforms; Sensors, Data and Information Services; Products and Applications; Users and Benefits – can be exploited to ensure successful exploitation of UAVs within precision farming.
You can access the white paper here
Founder & Chair @ Global MapAid | AI & Tech Sector
7 年I sense this technology needs to be in- house with the farmer owning and operating it themselves. This could work best in the West where the economies of scale add up. In the South most farming is smallholder. Perhaps there it would be the government or agro university better placed.
Laser Scanning + Drone Land Surveyor
8 年Hi Mark, I tried marketing my drone NDVI mapping services to the Agricultural market, but to no avail. It was even difficult to give my NDVI mapping service away, the service is just too expensive in proportion to the value of information NDVI maps can provide to farmers. It's a very clever thing to be able to do, but just like a lighthouse in a bog, very bright but of little commercial use. Land Surveying with a drone on the other hand, is very lucrative once you know how to do this with 2 centimetre level accuracy. Regulations have not been even a sight hinderince since first flying drones back in 2012 in Ireland. The RMax UAV is a good example of proliferation of an Agricultural utility drone, which sprays crops etc in difficult to access areas in Japan, which is, curiously, regulated by dept of agriculture as opposed to the Japanese Aviation Authority.
Thinking differently
8 年Before UAS can deliver the promise they offer to agriculture, the regulatory framework that they work within will need to be significantly matured, to allow them to operate far more freely than is currently the case. As currently written, CAP 722 places significant constraints on UAS operations in the UK, which limits their ability to cover enough ground, fast enough, regularly enough and with sufficiently permissive conditions, to make economic sense on anything other than a limited scale. This will change, but is not immediately around the corner, as significant legal, technical and social hurdles need to be overcome first.