Funded by the Illinois Soybean Checkoff
Drones and AI can gather vast amounts of data such as crop health, soil conditions and irrigation needs, allowing farmers to make more informed decisions.
AI + Drones = The New Frontier Joli A. Hohenstein
A
s farmers increasingly take to the skies for farm management, technology innovators, ag economists and agronomists find themselves in the unique position of assessing the potential as pilot, trainer, teacher and grower. DJI Agriculture recently released its Agriculture Drone
18 January 2024
Insight Report 2022/23, reporting that at the end of 2022, the global number of DJI drones exceeded 200,000 units. Their cumulative operating area exceeded 200 million hectares (nearly 500 million acres), bringing the benefits of aerial technology to hundreds of millions of agricultural practitioners. The World Economic Forum named agricultural drones one of the top three innovations
that could be key to producing more crops with less effort and less impact on the environment. In fact, the DJI report notes farmers are already seeing the results. For example, drone use helped a large-scale Washington potato grower reduce insect damage by 80 percent. Meanwhile, a Japanese rice producer used drones to increase yield to earn an addi-
tional $2,224 per acre. More and more growers and retailers have been using drones for scouting fields, but they still must contend with the missing link between identifying what they’re seeing and then acting on it. Artificial intelligence (AI), innovators say, is the next frontier. By combining drones and AI, farmers can reduce guesswork across fields. “If we have a field
