Since farmers are usually affected by unpredictable changes in weather and market, it is important that every purchased seed turns out to be a healthy yield. One way that farmers seek to optimize yield capacity is through early-season stand counts and looking for opportunities for replanting. Yet conventional approaches for evaluating stands take time and are vulnerable to human error.
In the field, counting crops to high precision standards is extremely time-consuming. It takes a very long time even to manually count even from images and does not provide a reliable result. To solve this issue, Artificial Intelligence powered customer portal provides the capability for AirSmat provide report of crop counts to our customers. We simply execute drone mission, funnel the data through our platform and the report is generated for our customers.
Farmers are obtaining highly precise stand counts with the aid of drones, and are taking measures to increase yield capacity. In a couple of minutes, a farmer can fly a drone over their fields, collecting images on every single hectare of crop. The data is then almost immediately converted into analytics of plant counts. Farmers can display their entire field or select zones, using the AirSmat AI powered platform, then calculate automatically, the number of plants per acre, row, or field, and get a highly accurate count of the number of plants that have emerged. As a result, farmers can optimize the planting input and increase their crop yield at the end of the planting season.
In comparison to traditional stand count methods, AI-powered drone-based plant count is designed to provide reliable results that are quickly converted into a plan of action with the farmer needing to spend less time on the field. And what’s even more important: with geo referencing capability, you will know where the areas with low germination levels are, allowing you to fix the problem at the very root of the issue. Although these traditional techniques have helped farmers determine the emergence of plants and yield potential for decades, they are only pure estimates. Most importantly, the sample counts do not provide the full picture of how many and where seeds did not grow. There may be a pattern suggesting a soil or fertilizer issue in a given area, causing long-term harm, but this could be overlooked by farmers just taking a sample count. But with the use of a drone and the AirSmat software platform, we can catch the pattern and provide more information for the farmers to work with.
With the AirSmat technology, a farmer can use high-resolution, visual sensors flown with a drone over their fields and capture images of their crops. The software detects plants automatically, from seedlings to full canopies, and places a marker over the canopy to count it. The software platform shows the gaps within each row where plants may be slow to emerge, or are missing, to help with replant decisions. Missing plants may mean a malfunction of the planting equipment, or that the soil was too damp for the seeds to germinate. Farmers can begin to understand what their yield will be, by seeing how many plants have emerged successfully, and how many gaps remain. As a result, further replanting opportunities can be exploited to improve their field ‘s yield efficiency. We offer a range of ready-to-fly drones at AirSmat. Our farming experts work with farmers to determine what they are trying to achieve with drone-based data and analytics, and to suggest a solution tailored to their needs.