The Potential for UAVs in Farming

Mississippi State University (MSU) Researcher Joby Czarnecki has worked with MSPB for several years on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research. Here, MSPB talks with her about recent projects and her goals with UAV research.

What is your history with UAVs?

I started my faculty job three years ago at MSU in the Plant and Soil Science Department. All my work prior to that was with geospatial technology, including remote sensing. UAVs are the latest tool for remote sensing, but we still use satellites and airplanes. I work with these technologies and help other faculty incorporate them into their work. I did not know anything about UAVs when I started; in fact, I had never seen one. But in the last three years, I have learned about UAVs’ power in providing data to agricultural research.

How did you begin to work with MSPB?

We received funding from MSPB to do UAV research. For all of my research funded by commodity boards I’ve worked with our Extension commodity specialists and other researchers. They share what problems the producers are experiencing, and together we consider how UAVs may fix those problems. I recognize UAVs aren’t going to be useful for all applications, so we target efforts on research that will be immediately useful. Right now, we are looking at what people are already doing and asking if UAVs could improve the efficiency or better inform a management decision.

Last year, MSPB funded work on identifying deer browsing with UAVs and calculating the severity of the damage. We purposefully damaged our plots at key growth stages with differing levels of damage. We wanted to find out if you could train a computer algorithm to evaluate the level of damage quickly and approximate the growth stage. With that information, a producer can take advantage of previous work that would indicate the likelihood of yield loss which already exists. In this case, the UAV would be a tool that informs decision making. We learned that we needed to adjust our methods and have repeated the study this season. The report from the first year of this study can be found on the MSSOY website here.

This year, we’ve been focusing on using the video feed from the UAV for everything from scouting for insects to growth staging of soybeans. In talking with producers who are currently using UAVs, we understand that they are comfortable using the streaming video. We’ve been trying it ourselves, and we found the video feed easy to use and have used it to identify items of interest. Using the propwash from the propellers, the signs of development up to at least R3 were visible. Even in closed canopies, the UAV was capable of seeing below the upper level of leaves when the propwash is used to expose the lower portions of the canopy. Towards the end of the season, we’ve been working on reliably identifying R6.5 so producers can rapidly scan the field to determine when they’re safe to apply a harvest aid.

What is one of the biggest issues with using UAVs on the farm?

The UAV marketplace sells low-cost, easy-to-fly aircraft. There are also a lot of free apps and paid subscription services out there that will handle flight planning, data collection, and processing. But that is where it ends for most companies. In order to get any value from the UAV, you have to do something with this information. Often these maps can be complicated and don’t tell you much unless you take time to understand what they are showing. I appreciate that producers are busy, and I want to reduce the burden for them as they incorporate this new technology into their operations.

Video scouting works really well for us, so I suggest that farmers just use video to start. It is a lot more intuitive. You can go out and look for where you know the bug problem starts or where you know the weeds or diseases always break out and just survey that. It’s also been helpful this summer on days when clouds wouldn’t give us a break, as we struggle to get good field images on partly cloudy days.

To give you an example of how UAVs can provide additional information, here is a photo from a field on our campus farm. There is a clear yellow ribbon running up the field. Standing in the field, it isn’t obvious that the ribbon runs across the entire field. From the air, we were able to see it continued on across several other fields. Our farm personnel knew instantly that they were seeing an old creek bed showing through. Their field history knowledge, combined with our image, was useful in determining both the extent and the cause of the yellowing. The UAV really helped identify an issue!

Stay tuned to mssoy.org for more on our UAV series.