As the public awareness of precision agriculture is growing the demand and mainly the amount of people interested in this field is growing as well. One of many who have joined the rapidly growing area of UAVs is Chris Anderson. He started his career by building drones and at that time had no idea what precision agriculture is or what it will become several years in the future.
"When I got into this, I thought it would be the future of flight, but now I think drones might be the future of food,"
In 2007 Mr Anderson entered the drone industry when he created an open-source platform which enabled the users of drones to share their tech and designs. As of now he is CEO of 3-D Robotics, a company which manufactures electronics for UAVs . Chris maintains that drones are, contrary to public's beliefs, unfit for domestic terrorism. He says that UAVs can carry only fairly light payloads and so are not as good at smuggling stuff as people. He thinks that drones, in the future, will not change the way we get our stuff delivered but will change the way we grow food.
"Here's a lightly edited version of what he said about the role of drones on farms:
This actually is a great tool for crop surveys. Drones are going to be one of the biggest sources of big data in one of the biggest industries in the world, which is agriculture. What they do is they take cameras and they put them over fields, and what that gives the farmer is information about water and chemicals and growth patterns. Once upon a time, farmers were able to walk their fields and know what was going on. Then big ag and the consolidation of agriculture created these massive farms. They don't know what's going on in the middle of the field.
You can now see fields through these infrared lenses, which shows the health of the plant, which gives them information that allows them to use water more efficiently and use fewer chemicals. We spray fungicides and pesticides prophylactically. Not because there's an infection, but because the cost of missing infection is the loss of crop. We've increased the chemicals in our environment and our food because we have a paucity of data."
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/events/archive/2013/10/drones-might-be-the-future-of-food/280223/
Image author: Adrian Mott
Image source: http://blog.bedrockdata.com/Portals/172139/images/fields_6.jpg
Příspěvek Chris Anderson on the Future of Drones pochází z MENSURO