Precision agriculture using drones has become much less about the novelty of having an eye in the sky and much more about fusing data from a variety of sources and platforms — including drones, satellites, ground sensors and others — to enable farmers to make informed decisions. 

One company that has become a major player within the farming industry is Toulouse, France-based Delair, which provides visual data management technologies. The company’s cloud-based platform, the Delair.ai platform, allows users to manage, process, view, analyze and collaborate around aerial data.

Agriculture and forestry professionals use the Delair.ai platform for mapping and scouting, so they can visually analyze fields. The platform is also used to run field inventory to characterize the crops, monitor them, and ultimately drive their precision ag practices.

One of the hallmarks of Delair’s products is they are platform agnostic, which is extremely beneficial for the company and its quest to add customers in the long run.

“The reason why it’s important to be agnostic is to not limit our customer base,” Thomas Nicholls, chief marketing officer at Delair, tells Unmanned Systems, noting that the company’s customers cover the gamut — some use both the hardware and software, while others use one and not the other.

Delair hasn't completely moved to software, as it also offers the UX11 Ag drone, a mapping system designed specifically for agriculture. The plant-mapping drone is capable of onboard data processing and has wireless and 3G/4G communications.

Equipped with a PPK-as-you-go (post-processed kinematic) feature, the UAS can precisely overlay maps for temporal analysis and help plan routes for ground-based agricultural machines. Capable of flying up to 59 minutes, the UAS can help count the number of plants a user has and determine which are healthy.
 
Agnostic technology 

Having agnostic software and hardware allows Delair to form partnerships with a variety of entities, such as the company’s recently announced partnership with Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Geosys, a company founded by agronomists which specializes in satellite and weather data analytics for agriculture. 

The partnership will seek to “expand the options for gathering and analyzing data for enhanced crop inputs placement, seed production and crop monitoring practices,” the companies say.

The partnership will deliver a single analytics platform that integrates drone and satellite data — focusing on the data, not the systems that got it.

Initially, Delair and Geosys will offer an integrated platform for agriculture professionals with variable rate fertilization management. France will be the first market to have access to this enhanced service through the Cerelia platform, a precision agriculture analysis system that Geosys offers in France to more than 40 co-ops and agriculture service providers. The new partnership will also use Delair’s UX11 agriculture drone.

“Today’s precision agriculture practices require comprehensive and accurate data from which meaningful insights can be derived,” says Matthieu Hyrien, vice president of business development at Geosys. “The combination of Delair’s flexible and high-performance visual intelligence platform with our powerful analysis and decision support tools can have a significant impact on the performance and profitability of agriculture operations.”

Delair and Geosys are interested in extending their offering to other applications such as weed control, real-time field behavior and performance analysis, and identification of yield improvement opportunities. The integration of the Delair.ai platform with Geosys will allow the addition of satellite and weather data to bring “enhanced knowledge and analytical capabilities” throughout the entire crop cycle.

Delair's UX11 agriculture drone. Photo: Delair

The companies say their partnership will also benefit from the upcoming UrtheDaily Constellation, a planned global coverage constellation that seeks to acquire “high-quality, multispectral imagery" at five meters ground sampling density, taken at the same time, every day, every field. The combination of these high-precision data sources will allow users to make faster, smarter decisions about their operation.

The combined offering can also help in accurate seed production monitoring and forecasting, which lowers logistics costs and markets risks. With the data and decision support tools available, users can quickly evaluate which fields need their attention, where they should focus their scouting efforts and identify the probable causes of crop growth anomalies.

“You can fly a drone when you want to; that agility and flexibility is a very good thing,” Nicholls says. “You can also fly with a wide range of sensors, which is very handy.”

Important decisions

Like Nicholls, Kevin Lang, general manager of agriculture at Raleigh, North Carolina-based PrecisionHawk, believes that drones offer a variety of benefits to the farming industry.

“Drones aren’t going to solve every issue, but they’re going to play an important part during the season to make important decisions,” Lang tells Unmanned Systems. “Every year, sensors are getting better, processing power is getting better, drones are staying in air longer, there is better situational awareness, and the technology is getting safer.”

PrecisionHawk’s primary agriculture software is PrecisionAnalytics Agriculture, a web-based portal designed specifically for agriculture users. The portal processes aerial imagery into 2-D maps and 3-D elevation models, and features a continuously expanding library of on-demand analysis tools, while making it easy to share data.

The portal automatically generates georeferenced orthomosaics from data collected using drone-compatible sensors, including visual, multispectral and thermal systems made by the likes of DJI, Parrot Sequoia, MicaSense Red Edge M/MX, and MicaSense Altum. The portal provides users with access to a continually expanding library of professional, on-demand farming analysis tools to gain the critical insights that they want, when they need them.

According to PrecisionHawk, its PrecisionAnalytics Agriculture is based on millions of acres of crop data and a decade of agriculture analytics experience. Harnessing the power of AI for farming professionals to use, the portal allows growers to make more precise and effective crop management decisions, maximizing yield potential and profitability; crop consultants to share with customers quantifiable measures of crop health data, via intuitive visualizations, in a single click; crop insurers to capture an exact and objective accounting of crop losses to refine their claims payouts; and agrochemical researchers and seed scientists to capture whole fields (instead of sampling) and segment the data plot-by-plot.

Using PrecisionHawk’s intuitive reporting system, users can conduct several important tasks before planting, as well as during the growing season, the company says.

Before planting, users can use the portal to assess water conditions in fields, determine areas that need drainage management, and assess soil health. During growing season, users can utilize the portal to, among many things, detect plant stress in mid-to-late growth stages, identify resistant weeds or invasive species, and rapidly assess storm damage to settle claims quickly and replant.

Obviously, drones and their accompanying software won’t solve every single issue that farmers experience, but they could help make the problem-solving process easier, and ultimately, more efficient.

“A drone won’t tell you the exact issue, but it will allow for more efficiency, and help professionals figure out where the issue is,” Lang says.

Below: A screenshot from PrecisionHawk’s analytics solution, PrecisionAnalytics. Photo: PrecisionHawk