Using Drones on Your Farm

Drones aren’t just for the battlefield anymore: you’ve probably seen them whizzing around the park or outside a friend’s backyard, and they’re becoming an increasingly popular option for taking care of everyday farming tasks as well. But what exactly is drone farming good for anyway, and what are some of the dos and don’ts of making these machines work for you instead of against you? We’ll take a look at some of your best options today at Fruit Growers Supply Co.

A Myriad of Uses

You might be surprised at all the ways you can use a drone to make your life easier on the farm. As the MIT Technology Review points out, you can customize your device to fulfill a wide slew of drone farming tasks, including spraying your cops, monitoring the health of your soil, and more. Some companies are even making air-ground hybrid drones that can complete a variety of tasks on your earth after they complete their surveillance, and the quality of the data gathered by these machines is improving by the day.

But even though they’re getting increasingly popular, you’ll still want to do a bit of research on the kind of agriculture drone that will be best for your farm. We’ll get into that in the next section:

The Challenges of Drone Farming

One of the peculiar things about drones is that they’re rarely designed to perform very specialized functions right out of the box. Most of them have roughly the same capabilities, but different brands will design different models with adjustments to account for things like aerodynamics, density and so forth. This means that you’ll be hard-pressed to stroll into a place like Home Depot and find a model that’s designed specifically for drone farming: you’ll have to buy a generic brand and then customize it a bit to get it to do what you want. Luckily, there are plenty of guides out there that will help you figure out which drones will be right for your farm and which ones you can leave to the city slickers.

But more importantly, this is still a relatively new field of agriculture, and that means drone farming is still advancing and still has some kinks to work out. You can get some extremely accurate reads on things like soil health from flying a drone over your field, but to be absolutely certain that everything is going to according to plan, you’ll still have to get out in the field yourself every now and then and check on your crops with your own two eyes and hands. There’s no total replacement for the human factor, but drone farming can still be an incredibly handy thing to fall back on, and these airborne helpers are only getting better at what they do as time goes on.

The Do’s and Don’ts of the Agricultural Drone

If you’re still feeling a little bit lost, this next section is for you. As we’ve said, this is still a pretty new area of agriculture and will likely take some time to really feel out. That’s why we’ve compiled a cheat sheet of drone farming pointers that are easy to remember and won’t leave you in the robotic, remote-controlled lurch.

• DO learn the ins and outs of the drone you end up purchasing for your farm. Read the manual, watch some tutorial videos on YouTube, and become as familiar with your new tool as you would with your tractor or pickup.
• DON’T attempt a fix or make an alteration if you sincerely don’t know what to do in a particular situation. There’s no shame in not knowing everything about drone farming right off the bat, and calling an expert in tricky situations will allow you to get back to your important business that much quicker.
• DO make use of your drone to cut out or reduce the time spent on the everyday busywork of running your farm, like spraying pesticides and checking soil health. Not only will it be quicker to automate these things, you can probably save a bundle on hired help by doing so as well!
• DON’T expect an agricultural drone to magically solve all of your farm’s problems. As stated, there are going to be some things that good old human knowhow can never be replaced by, no matter how advanced and efficient drone farming might become.
• DO see what all the fuss is about. Make sure you’ve got all the supplies you need to keep your farm in working order, and then go about experimenting with which ones you can attach to a drone to make the process simpler than ever before.
• DON’T let the phenomenon pass you by out of obstinance or an adherence to tradition. We guarantee that more and more farmers are going to be trying drone farming as time goes on, and you don’t want to be the one left out in the cold.

Stick with the Experts at FGS Co.

We’re all for trying out new technologies at Fruit Growers Supply Co., but that also means we feel a deep responsibility to make sure that the real human beings who work that technology in the first place have all the resources they need to thrive and grow. If you’re still on the fence about drone farming, our experts can provide all the resources and expertise you need to make an informed decision about what your farm can benefit from. Get in touch with us now or leave a comment below with thoughts or questions about our agricultural drone rundown, and as always rest assured that you’re in good hands when you choose to work with Fruit Growers Supply Co.