Drone Technology revolutionizing agriculture industry

by Faizan Ali.

Food is a basic necessity of every human being living on the planet, and is the prime objective for which human continuously operate in some sort of professional capacity with in the society. Growing food is a challenging task as it requires a whole load of inputs as well as utter dedication and care from growers at the same time.

The world population currently stands at about 8 billion and out of this nearly 10% (about 800 million) of the people go to bed without a proper meal in the day. This can be attributed to several logistics challenges and operational hick-ups resulting in decaying of food, leaving it unfit for the human consumption.

At the same time a major barrier is the on field challenges that limit the yield potential of crops and reduces corresponding production outputs. Global outlook for food industry is already quite fragile, with new prevailing challenges like increase in the global population, resource constraints and climate fluctuations, the situation can easily lead to horrific outcomes for everyone across the globe.

The world is currently facing massive challenges in form of water scarcity crisis, drought, heat waves, food shortages and several political challenges adding to the overall agony. All this in light of rising population forecast a haunting scenario for global food security in neat future. Right now, the agricultural sector is single largest consumer of fresh water resource, and despite of this huge figure many food growing sectors are facing acute water stress and with population rise this issue is meant to get more complex as domestic pressure will also weigh on fresh water resources deteriorating situation for agriculture sector even more. Shrinking fresh water can also trigger political or even military conflicts among countries sitting on the edges of such water related global fault lines.

An ongoing global conflict between two European nations has already raised food security risk in the world, indicating any armed conflict between countries can disrupt global food supply chains and with water like commodities at stake, onset of any conflict will wreak havoc on global food system. This certain challenge demand for more creative and innovative solutions, that will tend to resolve rising challenges of the sector while balancing the resource constraint (especially water resource) problem at the same time.

Since, the COVID pandemic the world is already in a global reset and it is very much the case for agricultural sector as well. The introduction of smart technologies in agriculture is the grand overhaul in the sector with advance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone technology being an important part of it.

Although drone tech has been around for nearly half a century its application has rapidly expanded over the last decade, sectors from logistics, e-commerce to military has seen a massive surge in drone tech usage. Most recently the field of agriculture has rapidly adopted drone tech for multiple task, with an aim to improve overall efficiency of sector.

A prime application of drone tech is the field assessment for diseases, nutrition deficiency and water stress, normally surveying and assessment of field is a time consuming, laborious process, especially for large sized fields where the risk of error is quite high and can be costly for the growers by the end of season. For these assessment purposes drones are mounted with specific hyperspectral-multispectral imaging sensor that tend to assess reflected wavelengths of light from plant leaf surface and judge the health of the plant as healthy plant reflects a different type of wavelength in comparison to diseased one.

Similarly, UAV based imaging sensors can also be utilized for water stress assessment as dehydrated and hydrated plants shows different light reflectance profile. These drone-based imaging in combination with satellitebased imagery data gives a better view of entire field and enable more efficient study and management of prevailing disease or stress related challenges. Furthermore, LIDAR (light detection and ranging) based drones provide a 3D view for the entire field that can distinguish between plants, weeds, trees, so that nutrient and other resources are effectively applied on to targeted portion of the field.

The tech can be useful in assessment of disease present in a filed as well as broader surveillance of disease pathogen that might try to flow from an infected field to a healthy one. Research team at Virginia Tech is now developing strategies to capture airborne spores of pathogen well before the land on new host plant, and thus enabling active surveillance of disease flow which in return can provide us an effective strategy development for disease containment and avoiding of an epidemic. Another potential application of drone tech comes in form of mechanically assisted pollination with start-ups initially focusing on pollinating almond, cherry and apple orchards (with more than 60% rise in pollination activity claimed in company reports).

Existing value of global drone industry is about $28 billion and according to a PwC assessment the potential total addressable value of drone-powered solutions in all sectors worth about $127 billion (with potential in agriculture sector being about $32 billion).

As the global population marches towards 10 billion mark the need for more productive and innovative approaches is more crucial than ever. Advance drone tech application in agriculture field can enable robust solution of these rising challenges and given high economic potential associated with the technology, growers should embrace this revolutionary strategy for food production in a productive and sustainable manner. This will ultimately take place in an environment where UAV drones working in a hybrid system with ground based sensors will generate large data sets for better understanding of field challenges and enable effective solution development.