Aerial Imagery Aids Decision-Making

As the growing season has progressed, aerial imagery has been part of the world record setting data-collection efforts for Terra, a single corn plant in a Farm Science Review field, writes Matt Reese of Ohio’s Country Journal and Ohio Ag Net. The bird’s eye view of the field through the 2017 growing season has been provided by AirScout.

“The full season package has 14 flights and they start approximately mid-April and fly every two weeks or so. In the heart of the season late June through mid-July, they fly every 10 to 14 days during peak vegetative growth. Then they widen the timeline back out to finish out the season. They will probably do two flights in September and another in October,” said Tim Berning, with Precision Agri Services in Minster, the only AirScout dealer in Ohio. “They use fixed-winged airplanes for the imagery. The full-year flights take priority. They get an approximate time and they fly when sky conditions are favorable for taking good images. With the planes they can very efficiently take pictures of a lot of acres in one flight.”

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Berning is an agronomist and CCA for Precision Agri Services and sees great value in the images for making farm decisions.

“We found the AirScout is a tool for the tool box to help make decisions. Any time we have a test plot we try to get aerial imagery on that. It helps us identify how the crop is responding to management changes. It also helps us identify external factors that would maybe hurt the research we are doing. Prior to using this imagery we didn’t have a good way to measure those factors. That is primarily a lot of what we use the imagery for — for the research projects we have going on,” Berning said.

MORE BY MATT HOPKINS

Read more at OCJ.com.

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