Toby excited for the future of Drones in Ag
21/11/2017A love of agriculture has led 6th generation farmer Toby Field to uncover a new passion for Flying Drones. Toby saved money for is first drone raising and selling lambs and bagging manure. After a lot of research and saving he was able to purchase a DJI Phantom 4.
A love of agriculture has led 6th generation farmer Toby Field to uncover a new passion for Flying Drones.The 12-year-old has been flying drones for two years now after seeing one in action at the Parkes Show farmers day.
Toby saved money for is first drone raising and selling lambs and bagging manure. After a lot of research and saving he was able to purchase a DJI Phantom 4. The top end $2000 drone flies up to a distance of 3km, at an altitude of 500m. It has a flight time of 25 minutes and can fly up to 80km an hour. If it loses signal, it has the smarts returns to the place it took off and land itself.
Toby uses the Phantom to check around the farm, monitoring water troughs, gates and ewes when they are lambing. He has also employed the drone for aerial photography including some before and after shots of a house under construction and a group photo at a wedding.
His long-term ambitions for employing drones in agriculture are a lot more technical. Toby wants to use special cameras for drone monitoring of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a technology that observes the health of crops and analyses nitrogen levels in the soil. Software can then transmit the requirements to a spraying tractor to deliver precise levels of chemical to the areas that need them.
Toby is thinking about purchasing the camera equipment needed for the monitoring, but without expensive software on the farmer's side integrated with the tractor he admits there isn’t yet a viable commercial opportunity.
This article originally appeared in the Parkes Champion Post