Agro-veillance: Using satelites and drones for precision crop maintenence

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Agricultural Tree Grading Maps Photo: satimagingcorp.com

The landscape architecture blog Pruned has a fascinating overview of using unmanned drones and satellites to produce maps which reveal terrific amounts of data for analyzing the relative health of crops. Being able to detect the relative difference in biomass in an orchard would allow the high-tech farmer to pinpoint water, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides to only the trees that need them, rather than flooding and dusting the entire orchard.

Once you are able to determine the relative health of each tree in the orchard, it is a natural leap to imagine a grid of capillary tubing delivering the precise amounts of nutrients and water required to maintain each tree at peak production. What about pesticides? Well, just use a little larger tube and shoot a stream of ladybugs at the affected tree!

Pruned on Agro-veillance

(Mister Jalopy is a guest blogger!)