Welcome to the Age of Digital Agriculture
Growers have traditionally relied on scouts to get the information they need to make decisions, writes David Eddy at Growing Produce. But there are a couple of problems with that. First, the data gathered isn’t always 100% reliable. Second, labor costs are rising – that is, if growers can even source the increasingly scarce labor they need.
Researchers at the Digital Agriculture Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, are trying to change that. Dr. Alireza Pourreza, a University of California Cooperative Education Specialist of Agricultural Mechanization, is leading a project to employ remote sensing for nutrient content detection in table grapes.
Growers have certainly seen some of this technology before, usually by companies eager to provide a service. But the goal of this project, says Pourreza, is to develop a decision-support tool that enables growers to automatically process and analyze the aerial imagery that they can obtain themselves by flying a drone equipped with a multispectral camera, and then make decisions based on that interpreted data.
Continue reading at Growing Produce.
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