In this growing age of technological advancement, there are little to no fields that are not directly affected by it. Agriculture is no exception. From fertilizers to pest control, technology has helped evolve agriculture way past normal standards.
Mechanization has also helped lift the manual load of farmers’ hands quite a bit. It has led to efficient tilling and harvesting. With the help of drones, farmers are now able to survey vast stretches of farmland, improve spraying efficiency, monitor livestock and irrigation systems, and so on.
Drones help farmers take immediate action in case of any threat like weeds, pests, or fungi. Since drones offer an aerial view, they help save time in crop scouting and eliminate manual surveying. Drones also help farmers increase productivity by automating the process of spraying pesticides and fertilizers.
The usage of drones to spray pesticides is significantly safer and more convenient when it comes to uneven terrains, infected areas, taller crops, and power lines. Farmers can also control spraying the crops directly, as this results in contaminating the crop as well as the soil.
The future of drones in agriculture looks promising. Drones are being developed to act as mechanical pollinators and comprise smart applications.
Drones also serve as a means to capture high-quality photographs and videos of crops, with an aerial view. Drones can be used for targeted input application, timely diagnosis of nutrient deficiency, crop health monitoring, and rapid assessment of crop yield and crop losses.
Israel has housed a legacy of agricultural technologies with advanced research and now, they’re beginning technological innovation in drones/robotics. Discover these innovative solutions of the Israeli companies:
Agridrones – Agridrones specializes in developing and supplying tailor-made solutions using unmanned aircraft. The company develops, produces, and assembles the core components of its drones, and holds a permanent flight permit granted by the Civil Aviation Authority of Israel, allowing full commercial operation of the system. Agridrones has focused on developing a heavy drone configuration for agricultural and sanitary uses.
Agroscout – Crop Monitoring for Early Detection and Identification of Plant Diseases. – AgroScout develops an autonomous solution for detecting disease and pests in crops. AgroScout combines field imagery data gathered primarily from drones with external data such as weather information to detect crop diseases at an early stage. The company uses the collected data, computer vision, and machine learning to provide a complete solution that accurately detects, identifies, and monitors diseases in the field and recommends future treatment. Its first application is designed for the potato market.
Bluewhite Robotics – Blue White Robotics provides Robot as a Service – a complete solution for seamless and efficient adoption of autonomous technologies. Their software platform plans and manages year-round operations while their robotics hardware adapts to existing infrastructure. They work with customers in the agriculture industry to achieve the highest levels of safety, reliability, and productivity for their business. Blue White Robotics creates a cohesive experience across farming operations year-round from sprays and harvesting to disking and seeding. By retrofitting existing infrastructure with intelligent autonomous algorithms, the robot tractors improve farm productivity, precision, and worker safety.
Agrowing – Agrowing’s vision and technologies enable accurate in-the-field automatic machine-vision and machine-learning identification of agricultural hazards like pests, diseases, and irregularities like stress and nutrient deficiencies. Agrowing revolutionizes precision agriculture by using the high-end NDVI maps, which are produced by Agrowing’s sensors, as the pedestal for its innovative patent-pending Remote & Close Sensing.
Cropx – Farm intelligence for intelligent farm management. Our planning and reporting tools allow farmers and agribusinesses to use detailed maps to record and schedule farm activities and monitor crop health and growth. Commands to sow, irrigate, fertilize, spray, and harvest can be sent from an app to many brands of compatible farm machinery.
SeeTree – SeeTree is an “Intelligence Platform for Trees” providing per-tree intelligence to growers to track their trees’ health and productivity. Using rich sources of information such as drones, satellites, IoT sensors, weather information and more, they scan and analyze hundreds of millions of trees. By utilizing their platform, unique needs of every orchard can be catered to. SeeTree generates data that supports cutting manpower hours and reducing spraying costs.
Tevel – Tevel’s solution is poised to revolutionize fruit harvesting. Their patented platform of Flying Autonomous Robots combines cutting-edge algorithms, AI, and data analytics. Fleet management optimization algorithms for harvesting based on orchard data, Stabilization algorithms to balance the forces applied on the robot by foliage and fruit, etc.
