Cyprus: Drones in agriculture – Less work, more production

Writes: Angel Nicolas
Unmanned aircraft (drones) can work for the benefit of agriculture, increasing agricultural production, improving the competitiveness and …
making it a profitable pastime. With the proper use of drones is saving resources and inputs, supporting the sustainable development of rural enterprise.
The precision agriculture is a management system of the whole farm with the use of information technology, satellite positioning data for remote sensing and data collection. Technologies the eye of the farmer and have as a goal the optimization of the efficiency of the factors of production and potentially reduce the environmental impact.
According to scientists who specialize in this technology, the integration of drones as a method of optimization of the growing activity offers and saving money. The agronomist Antony Περδικάρης notes that precision agriculture is to give benefits that will arise mainly due to the increase of yields, the improvement of working conditions, improvement of animal welfare and the protection of the environment.
The application of precision agriculture has been made possible thanks to the development of technologies associated with sensors, photogrammetry, mapping, the rapid development of unmanned airborne vehicle management and the connection of all these with actions related to the production process such as cultivation, sowing, fertilising, the application of preparations and finally the harvest.
Through the development of sensor technology collected information about the condition of the soil, water and microclimate.
As a technology, the use of φωτογραμμετρικής methodology to capture, with drones, it is now highly affordable and gives you the ability to create data of large volume covering large areas in a short period of time. According to experts, with a flight duration of 40 minutes can be collected data span up to 3,500 acres. If this inspection work was following the traditional route it would take, in principle, days, not be reflected the result in the same way taking into account the principle that says “what can you see from up in a field with a manned αεροσύστημα, you can’t see with the naked eye from any other point of its area”.
The use of drones to collect large volumes of data is an important tool for the management and prediction of production not only for the field crops and for greenhouse crops, since under certain conditions these systems can be used in the environment of the greenhouse for data collection.
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