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Competition for farmland is fierce. Many other farmers may want
to work the same land you do, whether renting or buying. Farming
is a highly competitive business. Being efficient in business is
essential to successful farm operations. Prioritizing management
activities that will increase profitability enables improvements
to the bottom line. Conducting crop stand counts with your farm
drone will be a worthwhile management endeavor to help improve
farm profits. A uniform stand of the growing crop means higher
yields and higher profits. The timing of replant decisions is
critical to success. A farmer cannot easily see what is
happening across an entire field, and driving in a truck or ATV
is time-consuming. With a drone, the farmer can analyze a larger
field in a few short minutes with a general flyover, which could
include lowering the drone to get a complete picture of the
situation. Using a drone for farm business requires the FAA Part
107 Certification.
Drone Mapping Takes Time
A complete drone mapping of your field can take significant
time. While these maps provide valuable information, fully
mapping an eighty-acre field is time-consuming. Preparation for
the flight, flight time, and managing thousands of photos can
take the farm producers hours to complete. Full field maps
produce a lot of information; however, a farmer doesn’t have to
map a whole field to get a good stand count analysis.
Conducting a brief high-altitude mission over your field should
be sufficient to obtain a clear picture of problem areas. A
farmer completing a quick field inspection mission can have an
overview of a large field done in as little as twenty minutes or
less. In most circumstances, drone pilots are regulatorily
limited to an altitude of 400 feet or lower. At 200 feet,
picking out problem areas by spotting color changes is easier.
If you identify a problem area, flying lower to obtain a closer
view may be sufficient. The drone can hover just a few feet over
growing crops, giving the farmer a good look at the situation.
In certain circumstances, a farmer needs a more detailed plant
count to determine the population for replanting decisions. It
could be only a small section or a whole field. The drone stand
count calculations for replant decisions are conducted shortly
after the crop emerges. A stand count mission can be done much
faster than a standard field health mapping mission and takes
less time because the analysis needs far fewer photos. It will
save time if the farmer can set up the mission on the office
computer vs. setting up the mission in the field. Results are
available immediately following the flight.
There are a Few Drone Applications for Stand Counts
A few drone applications conduct stand counts. Drone Deploy uses
a preplanned autonomous mission where the pilot starts the
mission, and the drone does the rest, including landing. The
pilot must be able to take control of the drone should problems
arise and keep it within the visual line of sight. The farmer
must set the mission altitude, row spacing, and crop vegetative
stage.
The ideal plant stage for accurate counts is at the V2-V3 stage
when plants are small. However, such missions can count plant
populations from VE to higher than V4, but the more mature the
plant is after V3, the less accurate the count will be. With
very mature plants, an exact count is impossible. A successful
replant is less likely once you are past the ideal plant stage.
Important Settings
The stand count software comes with useful presets. One of the
pre-settings is the gap threshold, which is the maximum distance
between plants before a plant is considered missing. The gap
threshold is essential to an accurate count. The gap threshold
tells the software how large a space to measure before counting
a missing plant. Start using the preset gap threshold but
increase the gap threshold if the drone counts fewer plants than
you know are there. If it is overcounting plants, then increase
the gap threshold. Changing this setting will become intuitive
after multiple uses.
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All these software settings are critical for an accurate stand
count. The lower the altitude of the mission, the more precise
the stand count. Use the presets except for the acres per photo,
which is one photo per three acres. One photo per acre gives
much more detail than three acres, the latter of which is the
standard setting. One-half an acre per photo is even better, but
for most missions, it is not necessary. Therefore, try a minimum
of one photo per acre. Changing the setting to even one photo
per one-half acre doesn't take much more time. A one-acre per
photo setting on 40 acres means only 40 photos, which is far
easier to manage than a regular field health mapping inspection.
In contrast, a standard field health inspection creates
thousands of photos to be stitched together by software to form
a map. A collection of forty photos is much more manageable than
thousands. With experience, stand-counting is a relatively
straightforward process.
Stand Counts Later in the Season
Sometimes, a farm producer needs to stand count data later in
the growing season for reasons other than replanting decisions.
Agremo, a web-based platform, can analyze your photos from a
standard mission to determine plant health issues and provide
the stand count populations. These missions can provide valuable
data on overall plant health, including plant population. These
missions take much more time to complete, and typically, the
data received comes in too late to replant the field.
Flying a stand-count mission with your farm drone using a
product such as Drone Deploy can help farm producers manage
valuable time and increase profits effectively. The entire field
typically does not need to be analyzed using these programs.
Keep mission records and photos for future comparative analyses
of your fields.
Quick Stand Count Tips
Obtain the FAA Part 107 Certification
Use Standard Presets
Overview of the Field First at 100 Feet in Altitude
Zero in on Problem Areas
Set the Software to One Acre per Photo Setting
Conduct a Stand Count on the Problem Areas or the Whole Field
About Extension
University of Illinois Extension develops educational programs,
extends knowledge, and builds partnerships to support people,
communities, and their environments as part of the state's
land-grant institution. Extension serves as the leading public
outreach effort for University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and
the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
in all 102 Illinois counties through a network of 27
multi-county units and over 700 staff statewide. Extension’s
mission is responsive to eight strategic priorities — community,
economy, environment, food and agriculture, health,
partnerships, technology and discovery, and workforce excellence
— that are served through six program areas — 4-H youth
development, agriculture and agribusiness, community and
economic development, family and consumer science, integrated
health disparities, and natural resources, environment, and
energy.
[Kevin Brooks, University of
Illinois Extension Farm Business Management and Marketing
Educator] |
