A two-year University of Adelaide project funded by the South Australian Grain Industry Trust used drone imagery to measure biomass, growth rate and greenness at trial sites in the wheat belt of South Australia.
Not only did the measurements correlate with physically collected results but data was able to be gathered more regularly because the drones are more efficient than manual techniques.
The ability for drones to potentially replace labour-intensive farming tasks has been known for some time. But the previous high cost of drone technology and doubts about the accuracy of the data they captured have held them back from widespread use in agriculture.
University of Adelaide Agricultural Scientist and Researcher Dr Rhiannon Schilling and Dr Ramesh Raja Segaran from the university’s Unmanned Research Aircraft Facility worked together on the project, which began in 2017 and finished last month.
The project used drones to capture aerial images of the Grains Research and development Corporation wheat trial sites every few weeks during the five growth stages from early tillering through to late grain ripening.
Dr Schilling said the more efficient use of drones not only allowed for data to be gathered more regularly but also avoided the destructive practice of physically taking biomass samples.
“At the moment when you try and measure biomass throughout the season, every biomass cut we take is reducing the grain yield from the plot so we want to minimise that,” she said.
“It’s really fast to go out and image our sites using a drone – within half an hour we can have our site imaged.”
