You wake up at dawn, coffee in hand, ready to survey hundreds of acres of farmland – but do you really have to do it on foot? What about the gas costs of driving up and down your farm to assess your crops and livestock herds? Or maybe your labor costs are going through the roof because of all the extra hands you have to hire to manage your farm.
For farmers, the daily grind includes a host of challenges: unpredictable weather patterns, pest invasions, and the constant quest for higher crop yields, all while battling to rein in those operational costs that maul through your profit margins. You can tackle these age-old problems by integrating drones into your farm operations. They turn mundane and labor-intensive tasks into a series of simple taps on a screen, giving you insightful aerial footage to guide critical decisions you make. Let’s look at different areas where the agricultural UAVs have proven to be an asset, making farming smarter, more efficient, and a lot less stressful.
6 Ways Farmers Are Using Drones For Agriculture Tasks
1. Aerial Spraying
Drones for spraying farms fly over fields at high speeds, covering wide swathes of land in a fraction of the time it would take using traditional ground-based methods – the likes of boom sprayers mounted tractors, or you walking around with a knapsack sprayer on your back. Such methods can be slow and require multiple passes over the field to ensure full coverage. The rapid coverage with drone sprayers is also beneficial during narrow windows occasioned by weather conditions and crop growth stages.
Moreover, crop dusting drones target specific areas with a high degree of accuracy, minimizing chemical wastage and ensuring that pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers are applied only where needed. This conserves resources and prevents chemical drift to non-target areas. With features like the atomized spraying system of the DJI Agras T50, fine droplets are uniformly spread, resulting in more even ground coverage.
You can even adjust the droplet sizes from 50μm to 500μm using the remote controller. The drone carries up to 40 kg of liquid due to the coaxial dual rotor design, which gives it an increased spray load per flight.
Operating at an efficiency of 50 acres of every hour, the agricultural spray drone is ideal for largescale farms. And using it with DJI Smart Farm, you’ll have a smoother time managing your operations.
The Agras T25, its smaller variation, is more suited to small and medium-sized farms with its 20kg spraying load capacity. We did a side-by-side review of the performance of the two spraying drones here: DJI Agras T50 & T25 Drones – Everything You Need To Know
2. Livestock Management
Every farmer appreciates the value of being able to observe the health and behavior of your livestock without the need for frequent ground inspections – and even detect things that wouldn’t have been visible to the naked eye. Thermal imaging drones like the Autel EVO II Dual 640T show you abnormal body temperatures in animals, indicating potential health issues like infections or illnesses early on. That way you can find, isolate and treat sick animals quickly, preventing the spread of disease.
Operations with drones makes it easier to implement effective grazing practices, including managing pasture quality by spotting overgrazed areas or detecting insufficient water supplies in remote locations. Since you can automate these monitoring tasks and plan flight paths, it reduces the labor costs when running your farm.
Also Read: The Power Of Thermal Imaging With Your Drone
Carry out regular patrols over large grazing areas, to ensure animals are within their designated boundaries without having to do the legwork or fuel your truck and make the farm tours. Track your herds, over those ranches and similar extensive tracts of land. You can do this all with the right livestock managing drone.
Find trespassers and any sign of illegal activity on your land quickly. Even keep an eye out for predators like coyotes that are responsible for massive losses of goats, sheep and cattle losses across North America. There are even those who use the drones for legal hunting of wild boar that invade which everything from farm fields to flower gardens and golf courses. Apparently, nothing is off-limits to them. They uproot crops, compete with your herds for fodder, and carry diseases that can infect your livestock. Also called feral swine, they are estimated to cost the U.S agricultural sector $2.5 billion every year.
2. Crop Monitoring & Health Assessment
Drones with advanced imaging technologies like RGB and multispectral sensors capture data across various light spectra, including the near-infrared, which helps in assessing plant health and spotting stress early before it becomes visible to the naked eye. That way farmers to pinpoint areas of a field that may be under stress due to pests, diseases, or insufficient nutrients, enabling timely intervention to mitigate damage.
The lightweight and portable Mavic 3M can be quickly deployed for such tasks, giving farmers visual and multispectral data every single flight – which you then import into DJI Terra to develop a prescription map. It weighs just 920g, and can collect data with centimeter-level accuracy due to its RTK capability and mechanical shutter.
Integrating agriculture software platforms for drones such as DJI SmartFarm adds to the value of this, where you can streamline tasks such as field scouting, pest and disease detection, and crop yield estimations. You can even detecting growth differences using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and generating prescription maps. Synchronize this data with the spraying drones and you can now have more targeted fertilization and pest control.
Also Read: 9 Things You Can Do With DJI SmartFarm
Extra Tip: How to Collect Crop Samples Automatically With DJI Dock 2
When you’re running a large farm, you’ll regularly need samples to keep track of the progress of things – but doing so manually takes time, and comes with its labor costs. You can get around that using the automated drone docking system, DJI Dock 2.
Set up the dock on a secure, level area of your farm, and ensure the drone is correctly configured with its required payload. It’s particularly effective with the DJI Matrice 3TD, which features an integrated RTK module, a triple-camera system that includes a 28x zoom thermal camera, 48MP wide-angle camera and 12MP tele camera, and has an 10km operating radius. Using the DJI FlightHub 2 software, schedule routine flights over your fields.
This setup allows for automatic launch, collection of orthomosaic data, and return of the drone without manual intervention. After each flight, the drone will return to the dock where the collected data can be automatically uploaded to the DJI FlightHub 2 or another chosen cloud-based management systems for processing and analysis. This process helps you monitor crop health and growth trends efficiently.
Syngenta, a global agricultural firm, worked with DJI Dock at its Illinois research farm. This Dock 2’s predecessor was strategically placed to cover three expansive plots of corn and soybeans. They relied on the Zoom and Thermal capabilities of the Matrice 30T long range drone to collect the data. The 5x-16x Zoom sensor enabled close-up inspections of individual leaves, identifying disease and insect damage, while the 640×512 resolution thermal imaging camera provided insights into plant stress levels related to environmental factors like water and fertilizer usage. That way they could comprehensively analyze the plants’ health, capturing the data through FlightHub 2. And since this is a cloud based system, the raw photos could be viewed from anywhere in the world.
Syngenta partnered with DroneDeploy, a specialist in photogrammetry software, to analyze the imagery. The raw data captured by the drones were uploaded to DroneDeploy's platform, where it was transformed into detailed visual maps and thermal analytics. Read more about this, including how they planned area routes, here: Syngenta deploys a fully autonomous imagery solution to monitor crop health
4. Soil and Field Analysis
When a farmer uses a drone for soil analysis, the goal is to gather detailed information that can help optimize agricultural practices. Take the moisture levels for instance. Drone drones for farming with thermal cameras can show areas of the field where there are inconsistent heat signatures. Contrast this with the multispectral imagery that shows which crops are struggling, and you will be able to readjust irrigation plans as needed. This is because soil temperature and local microclimatic conditions have a significant impact on seed germination, plant growth, and pest dynamics.
Spectral imaging technologies used together with soil sampling also shows you how different levels of key nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are affecting your crop, for precise fertilizer application going forward. And while drones themselves may not directly measure pH levels, they can help map variations in crop health and stress, which can be indicative of underlying pH imbalances. Analyzing temperature variations in the crops themselves can also show signs of disease – and for this is done with drones that have thermal imaging capabilities.
One way of analyzing your landscape and crop biomass, especially over large tracts of land, is using the Matrice 350 RTK drone. This long range drone for farming comes with two TB65 batteries and can cover up to 3 km² per flight. And since it is compatible with different kinds of sensors, you will be able to choose the payload that suits your needs.
For this particular task, it’s recommended that you use the Zenmuse L2 LiDAR sensor – which features a high-accuracy IMU system, and a 4/3 CMOS RGB mapping camera. This sensor itself is good for 2.5 km² in a single flight and supports up to five returns, ensuring dense and detailed data collection. The effective point cloud rate is 240,000 points per second, with a detection range of 250 meters at 10% reflectivity.
Using DJI Pilot 2 prepare a 2D flight mission tailored to capture both LiDAR and RGB data, a dual-data approach that gives you a rich dataset of topographic and color information.
Simply conduct the flight as per the planned mission, the load the collected data into DJI Terra. This software will process the raw data into usable formats such as DOM, DSM, point clouds, and orthomosaic images.
DJI Terra can generate accurate 3D models of the landscape – and the processed models into third-party software that can classify crop types, estimate volume and biomass, and assess the health and distribution of crops across the analyzed area.
5. Precision Mapping and Surveying
Combine drone tech like high-resolution cameras, RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) GPS, and sensors such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) or photogrammetry payloads, and you can generate detailed terrain models with accurate measurements. Drone agriculture mapping can be in 2D or 3D, depending on the kinds of sensor and data processing software used.
Also Read: What is the Difference Between Pix4D, Drone Deploy, and DJI Terra?
Working with drones for farm mapping offers several advantages over traditional methods. They can access difficult terrains, collect diverse types of data, and significantly reduce both the time and cost associated with large-scale land surveys. This gives you actionable insights to make informed decisions that optimize your crop production and resource management.
For instance, DJI Mavic 3E comes with RTK capability for centimeter-level accuracy and a mechanical shutter to capture sharp, high-resolution images. It works without needing Ground Control Points, has a 56x hybrid zoom lens and the shutter allows fast 0.7-second interval shooting. You can easily carry this lightweight drone across different farms to carry out your survey tasks, thanks to its portability (weighs 915 g), and straightforward setup, making it perfect for single-pilot operations. Use it to create detailed maps and conduct precise stand count analysis, and you get long range transmission on each flight – of up to 15km. Plan your mission using the DJI Pilot 2 software, where you can set up either a 2D mapping mission for regular orthomosaic data acquisition or a waypoint mission for site-specific video recording and panoramic stitching. Import the collected data into DJI Terra to generate 2D maps and 3D models.
Extra Tip: Enhance your DJI Terra workflow using DJI Modify
This ‘photoshop-like’ tool gives you detailed editing tasks such as texture repairs and object flattening, a bonus for the usability of the final maps and models generated. For example, you’ll be able to refine and get more pixel details for the farm structures and resolve issues with water surfaces whose reflective nature may have affected sensor readings. Find out more things you can do with it here: 5 Ways DJI Modify is Transforming Aerial Surveys.
6. Planting and Seeding
Relying heavily on manual labor or mechanical seeders pulled by tractors costs you a lot. Such methods come with logistical challenges, with more time and physical effort being required. They are also less precise, causing issues like uneven seed distribution, wasted seeds, and ultimately, suboptimal crop yields. Not while you can quickly load the seeds onto a drone and send it flying over your farm, ensuring that the seeds are evenly distributed with optimal spacing. It costs way less, and gets the task done much faster.
The Agras T50 is one of the best planting drones, with its 50kg spread load capacity, flow rate of 1,500 kg of granules hour, and its spiral channel spinning disk enabling this to be uniformly done. Plus the Agras drone covers 21 hectares every hour, another win on the operational efficiency front. Should you want a low flow rate, simply switch to the small hopper gates – which gives you more precision especially during seeding tasks. Note that the spreading system is not designed for powders. It supports granular materials only.
Drone Farming Made Easier
After going over these 6 tasks covering how are drones used in agriculture, feel that it is time to bring the same to your farm? Get in touch with our team at (877) 299-1075 / (213) 262-9436 or email [email protected]. We will help you determine which UAV is right for you, as well as offer support for models that you have already integrated into your operations.
Drone training for farmers available as well, from getting you up to speed with FAA requirements and other regulations, operating the aircraft, using imaging processing software and even dealing with survey outputs. Our team ready to come on-site and work with you and your crew to address your unique situation. Learn more: Advanced UAS Operator Course
