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Drones are strong allies in the future of global agriculture

Since drones began to be popularized in the last decade, these remotely controlled flying devices have quickly moved from their status as an oddity to an indispensable utility in several sectors of the economy and science, among many others. At SLC Agrícola, drone technology is already widely used in precision agriculture and the limits of its application are constantly being updated, as explained by Ronei Sana, Digital Agriculture Manager at SLC Agrícola.

In plantations, drones are used to monitor crop development and allow more precise decisions to be made, such as the application of inputs in a localized manner. With the use of different cameras, it is possible to obtain multispectral images, which offer maps that indicate the presence of pests, weeds and whatever else the human mind can program them to capture, combining technological resources.

Currently, drones help monitor cultivation areas with georeferencing by accurately capturing images of each centimeter of the area. "Currently, 100% of the imaging of SLC Agrícola is made by drones and we are also part of the applications in border or near roads, for example, using these resources. SLC Agrícola plans to use them to spray inputs in up to 10% of the areas in the future”, Sana explains.

As it is unmanned, the drone allows access to places where people and tractors cannot enter. In such cases, drones often increase accuracy and decrease risks in the application of pesticides, for example, in addition to generating savings, for the same reason.

Especially in managing large cultivated areas, drones are widely used in topographic surveys, fertilizer and corrective application, crop supervision, pest and disease mapping as well as the generation of productivity maps. There are several software aimed at precision agriculture, which assist in data processing and improving results, and every day new software appear, developed to capture new nuances of the agricultural universe.

For plant counting, for example, a drone can fly over a plantation, record the images and process them in software that will inform the exact number of plants in the field, analyzing the efficiency of the crop.

Drones can also be used in spraying, directly, in places that are difficult to access, only where it is necessary, without damaging healthy plants and without causing losses due to trampling, in addition to eliminating the risk of exposure of people to plant protection products.

Will they replace airplanes? In Brazil, the answer is most likely no, at least that is not what is envisioned for the near future, according to Sana. “The properties are too large to be sprayed on a large scale by drones. It would take a huge swarm of drones to cover an area as extensive as our plantations. In this case, it would be much more expensive than using airplanes”, he explains.

In Brazil, the agricultural use of this equipment is still in the early stages. According to the National Civil Aviation Agency (Anac), approximately 80 thousand drones were registered in the country up until last year, and about 1,500 of them were used in agriculture.

Drones are strong allies in the future of global agriculture

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