Drones Use Across Latin America:A Taguay Case Study

Across Latin America, farmers are continuing to innovate each year to be more cost-effective and resource efficient. By incorporating new technologies, like drones, growers are finding better, faster ways to improve the production process for their agribusiness.  To reach yearly production goals, it’s important to measure and estimate different variables across plots to improve decision-making and make continuous improvements in the field.

THE TECHNOLOGY

SOME OF THESE SOLUTIONS ARE:

identification of resistant weeds nitrogen fertilization adjustments for wheat and corn plant counting damage evaluation due to hail, wind and freeze precision phenotyping estimation of flooded areas 3D models for the systematization of fields and volumetric calculations, among others.

Two years ago, Taguay S.A. began incorporating the use of drones to improve agricultural productivity. As a company, Taguay decided to partner with PrecisionHawk not only to provide high resolution image services, but also to generate information which can solve problems that nowadays put a producer’s business at risk.

Today Taguay represents PrecisionHawk, a leading provider of aerial data and safety platforms for commercial drones, across Argentina.

Taguay flies both the PrecisionHawk Lancaster (fixed wing drone) and the PrecisionHawk Smarter Farming Package (multirotor drone) and uses PrecisionHawk’s data platform, DataMapper, for processing, management and analytics.

Nowadays, drones or UAVs are pivotal when it comes to collecting information from high resolution aerial images and they enable growers to monitor plots more precisely than ever before.

Characteristics such as "high resolution", the "flexibility to fly in crucial moments" and the use of "multispectral images" help us to make decisions such as nitrogen application in corn and wheat, generate weed map prescriptions in soy and corn to have control over crops and at the same time take care of the environment, reducing costs, identifying variability (soil, pests, diseases) to make timely decisions, make yield estimations to obtain more accurate projections.

Monitoring a soy plot by collecting drone imagery with a 3cm/px resolution, using RGB and multispectral sensors. Subsequently we applied the specific algorithms to find solutions to the problem.

ASSESSING CROP DAMAGE

After the rain, the Taguay flight team went out to the field to fly the PrecisionHawk Lancaster, a fixed wing drone that weighs 5lbs and can fly for nearly 45 minutes, to determine the extent of the problem and to find a quick solution.

That year was an “EL NIÑO” year, therefore the consequences of waterpooling and water excess would affect not only corn but soy as well. After flying over the 500 hectares plot, the imagery was uploaded to the DataMapper software where it was automatically stitched into a 2D map and a 3D model of the entire plot.

There was an intense period of rain over a Taguay corn field (170 mm of rain in 24 hours). The field is flat and subsequently the plot ended up flooded and the crops were damaged. At the time of the flooding the corn in the field was in the Crop stage Z1.2 (Zadoks scale).

[Water runoffs generation from hydrological and elevation models]

Once Taguay had their plot map in DataMapper, They were able to run the ‘Waterpooling Algorithm’ which automatically and accurately identified the standing water in the agricultural plot.

The algorithm segments aerial imagery and, by using water’s natural property of absorbing light in the near-infrared region, identifies areas with the highest probability of being standing water.  The field has two natural channels and based on the elevation and hydrological models generated from the information gathered by the drone, Taguay also identified the primary and secondary water runoffs.

This information was used to systematize the countryside avoiding future waterpooling and recovering the affected areas.

CONCLUSION

Today drones act as a complementary tool that helps Taguay, as an agribusiness and a service provider to other agribusinesses, make decisions in critical moments. Considering the aforementioned, Taguay SA and PrecisionHawk are working on R&D (research and development) projects to continue advancing solutions based on the development of sophisticated algorithms that can identify important information, including crop specific analysis, to a farmer.  If you live in Latin America and are looking to get started with one of PrecisionHawk’s remote sensing packages please contact us at info@taguay.com.ar.

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