Anyone working in the agriculture sector knows that the more you know about your field, the better. With the growing season rapidly approaching, learn how to optimize your farming operations with drone tools specifically built for your business. In this piece, we’ll take a look at how DroneDeploy features such as Live Map, Multispectral Imagery, and Annotations can maximize productivity and enhance yield and profitability.
Live Map
One of the most popular features in DroneDeploy is Live Map, where users receive real-time plant health maps delivered directly to their device all while their drone is flying. Being able to view their entire property field-side holds a significant advantage to farmers and service providers; they can quickly address issues while simultaneously avoiding manual inspections, saving both time and resources. No data uploads or cloud processing are necessary when using this feature, so in-field analysis and reporting are available almost instantly after your drone has finished flying.
Multispectral Imagery
In conjunction with the Live Map, multispectral imagery* is also important when analyzing plant health. This imagery shifts the focus to analysis, highlighting crop variability up to 4x faster than RGB data. Information from these maps can be used to adjust nitrogen prescriptions, evaluate damage and equipment issues, and identify weeds or pests.
Annotations & Overlays
Managing agriculture operations is complex and involves many stakeholders. With the added challenge of multiple employees working over hundreds or thousands of acres of farmland, it is imperative their information can be easily shared. DroneDeploy becomes instrumental in solving these challenges. After users have received their map, they can annotate selected areas and share them across teams. Comment streams refresh in real-time, so large teams can get updates instantly. This is great for pinpointing land that needs to be scouted, gathering samples, or quantifying damaged areas.
If the team has been using DroneDeploy for a while, comparing maps to previous years is also a convenient tool. New to DroneDeploy are shapefile overlays, which allow agriculture professionals to visualize property boundaries in the context of their map. This feature, combined with historical data, makes it easier to create crop prescriptions, analyze yield maps, and plan drone flights.
These features provide added benefits to farmers beyond just mapping. Being able to use infrared technology gives them a detailed look at how their crops are growing and allows them to troubleshoot issues before they really begin. With a host of data available through mapping, agriculture professionals are able to view the complete ecological system of the farm and make well-informed quantitative decisions, producing a better yield and profit margins.
*DroneDeploy currently supports flight and processing for Micasense and the Phantom 4 Multispectral drone.
If you're interested in learning more about drones in agriculture, watch our free webinar on getting started.