Farmers can buy the drones outright for less than $1,000 each. It’s also much cheaper than crop imaging with a manned aircraft, which can run $1,000 an hour. Because it’s taken under the clouds, it’s unobstructed and available anytime. Compared with satellite imagery, it’s much cheaper and offers higher resolution. This low-altitude view (from a few meters above the plants to around 120 meters, which is the regulatory ceiling in the United States for unmanned aircraft operating without special clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration) gives a perspective that farmers have rarely had before.

Top: A drone from PrecisionHawk is equipped with multiple sensors to image fields.īottom: This image depicts vegetation in near-infrared light to show chlorophyll levels. Its software plans the flight path, aiming for maximum coverage of the vineyards, and controls the camera to optimize the images for later analysis. Whereas a traditional radio-controlled aircraft needs to be flown by a pilot on the ground, in Kunde’s drone the autopilot (made by my company, 3D Robotics) does all the flying, from auto takeoff to landing. These aircraft are equipped with an autopilot using GPS and a standard point-and-shoot camera controlled by the autopilot software on the ground can stitch aerial shots into a high-resolution mosaic map. What “drones” means to Kunde and the growing number of farmers like him is simply a low-cost aerial camera platform: either miniature fixed-wing airplanes or, more commonly, quadcopters and other multibladed small helicopters. He’s part of the vanguard of farmers who are using what was once military aviation technology to grow better grapes using pictures from the air, part of a broader trend of using sensors and robotics to bring big data to precision agriculture.

He’s also a drone operator-and he’s not alone. Ryan Kunde is a winemaker whose family’s picture-perfect vineyard nestles in the Sonoma Valley north of San Francisco.

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