(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa State University Rural Life Poll finds many farmers haven’t embraced the use of drones as a tool. J. Arbuckle oversees the poll. “About 22 percent that indicated that they used a drone in the previous year. So, it’s almost a quarter, but it’s still a pretty minor percentage,” he says. “And even those who were using drones, indicated some uncertainty about some of the potential benefits and potential downsides of using drones.”
He says most farmers in the poll hire others to do the drone work. “Fifty-one percent paid a specialized drone service provider for drone services. Then another 37 percent paid an agricultural cooperative or ag retailer for drone services. So, there’s probably a little overlap between those two categories. And then we had 26 percent of the drone users indicated that they owned a drone or a multiple drones,” Arbuckle says.
There were also a small number who say they rent a drone, or borrowing one from a neighbor. Extension specialist Doug Houser conducts drone training classes and says the most popular use is for scouting fields. “You can take the drone up, you can see the entire field, and then you can direct where you’re going to go scouting, because the drone will tell you there’s a problem, but then you need boots on the ground to go see,” he says. “So that’s the number one. And the entry into that type of a drone is anywhere from 800 dollars on up, so it’s pretty cheap.” Applying pesticides, planting cover crops and applying fertilizer were the other uses for drones.
House says drones for those uses can cost 45-thousand dollars or more and many farmers higher professionals for those services. He says wet conditions last fall showed an advantage of using drones for spraying.
“The high clearance sprayers were parked in the shed. Fields are too wet, you couldn’t get in. The manned aircraft were booked, overbooked. And so farmers really didn’t have a lot of choice if they didn’t have access to this type of technology,” Houser says. Houser says the drones offer much more flexibility in scouting fields than the old fashioned “windshield survey” gathered by driving along fields.
“The imagery drones is allowing us to manage at a higher level than we ever have. We could still have a manned aircraft. I could hire a manned aircraft to fly over my field. It costs money, but if I want to do it today, if I have the drone in my hand, I can just take it up and I can do it every day if I want to see or do different fields,” Houser says. He says drones continue to improve.
“The drone technology just three years ago is totally different now. The sophistication, the engineering that’s gone in them, I mean, they’re working right now on being able to fill the spray drone tanks autonomously. So when it lands on the trailer, it fills it up. They’re working on changing batteries. And so the technology is taking off at warp speed,” Houser says. He says there’s technology that allows drone to identify weeds in fields through images and then a farmer can target those areas, saving time and spray.
