Just one of the many challenges to productive agriculture and horticulture, is being able to quickly gather accurate information about threats, or yield limitations to cultivated plants and crops. The threats maybe insects, nutrient or water deficiencies and weeds. The invasions or deficiencies can be over whole or isolated areas, or individual plants. In many cases gathering this information can be a labour intense, demanding and time consuming job, especially if the growing area is hard to access due to dense plantings, sloping and or rough terrain leaving the only option on foot.
On many occasions in difficult access situations, the only option, until now, was to treat a whole area with herbicide, insecticide or fertiliser. Treating a whole area to eradicate a small problem often results in a small return, but what now can be an avoidable cost.
How much easier would it be to be able to gather all the information relating to insects, diseases, nutrients and water, over an area of 1 to 20 Ha in less than an hour. 20 minutes later produce a map that shows (to an accuracy of 2-4 cm) what each problem is and where it is. Then only treat the required areas 2-4 hours later the same day with huge savings on herbicides/fertiliser/pesticide.
This is the Proagco option.
A small Citrus orchard covered an area of 1.5 hectares, but was located in rugged hills where the trees were planted in uneven density and had grown to different heights of between 3 and 5 metres. Previously it took two days for three workers to manually spray the entire orchard. By using our UAVs to firstly identify the extent and location of infected trees followed by the application of chemicals, this time was reduced to 6 hours.
