Arable Matters – by Brain Henderson

While Scotland’s bagpipe players might have been perfecting the use of drones for centuries, the country’s farmers are at risk of being left behind in the development of their modern name-sakes – but a workshop held recently aimed to 'put a kilt' on the technology…

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – or drones as they are probably better known – are appearing in the arable sections of this and other farming papers with almost embarrassing regularity.

In fact, given the coverage they’re receiving, you’d expect Santa’s sledge to have a hard time dodging the things as he flies around the countryside delivering Christmas cheer.

While drone design is undoubtedly improving all the time, though, it would be fair to say that the first burst of enthusiasm for the technology was pretty much fuelled by the fun of piloting what is, to all intents and purposes, a remote control mini-helicopter.

But, in common with a lot of the toys which will shortly be appearing under Christmas trees and in stockings around the country, after a couple of days, once the initial thrill has worn off and the batteries have run flat a few times, there is a tendency for these hi-tech toys to be consigned to a cupboard and forgotten.

I think that the farming industry is kinda in that position just now – for while the technology has matured to the extent that extremely capable models are now available at a price which many businesses could afford, we’re just not all that sure what UAVs can do for us.

Yeah, ok, you can fly them over hundreds of acres in a day and take shed-loads of photos of your crops, identify wet patches in fields and, with enough time and close enough scrutiny of the resulting images, probably pick up some weedy patches in various fields.

While encouraging us to get us off our backsides and take a closer look at these problem areas might be useful, it’s not really making full use of the technology.

The data capturing capacities provided by drones and the various satellite technologies have long been appreciated, but actually pinning down a practical means of converting this into on-farm yield improvements or cost savings has so far proved to be a bit difficult, especially in the Scottish situation.

So, it was I was interested to attend a meeting between scientists, researchers, designers and farmers earlier this month which was set up to take the first steps towards bridging this gap and allowing the technology to jump the hurdle of simply being viewed as an interesting toy – albeit one with huge capability and potential for the future.

The event in Edinburgh, organised by the SRUC and Edinburgh University to analyse this potential, also marked the first step towards 'putting a kilt' on the technology by adapting the electronic wizardry to suit Scotland’s landscape of patchwork fields, hills, slopes and inclines.

For, so far, most of the applications are better suited to the straightforward landscapes of the huge, flat, monoculture fields of the American prairies.

At the meeting, Angus farmer, Mike Cumming, who had been an early adopter of precision farming and the use of drones, said that while a deal of technological savvy was required to draw useful information from drone and satellite imagery, to a great extent all it really did at the moment was confirm what he already knew.

He said the technology was good for highlighting areas of differing performance in crops – usually where there had been wet patches or drought stress.

But these were usually associated with different soil types – and were factors which most farmers who had worked the land for years would be aware of anyway.

However, Mike said that the ability to recognise crop stress caused by disease or a deficiency of nutrients or water earlier than could be identified by conventional monitoring methods would mark an important breakthrough – and allow problems to be addressed and remedied before yields had suffered.

The 'win-win' economic and environmental benefits gained from being able to carefully target both pesticides and fertilisers to the areas needed, rather than a blanket approach was seen as a big plus in getting support for political support in developing the technology.

But while a piece in The Scottish Farmer last week spoke about advances which allowed areas of blackgrass to be identified, while that might be highly important down south it’s not really yet a major issue in Scotland, though there is some around.

This only emphasised the point that we need to make sure that problems relevant to the Scottish situation are addressed.

Back at the meeting, Euan Walker-Munro, of Mains of Kinnettles, Forfar, was also keen to see the technology develop from its current role which he termed 'electronic field walking' – despite the fact that the technology had allowed him to view more than 700 ha in a single day.

However, he said that as well as a requirement to develop the technology there was also a number of other factors currently acting to limit its on-farm use.

Broadband capability when submitting images for analysis was, he said, a major stumbling block at the moment:

“Using our own broadband it took 14 hours to upload a series of pictures for remote data analysis – whereas this could be done in 19 minutes had high speed broadband been available.”

And while CabSec Fergus Ewing might have promised us that everyone in Scotland would have access to high speed broadband by 2021, last week, I just hope that the £600m of taxpayers’ money to be ploughed into this is better spent than the £180m on the support IT system.

I won’t be holding my breath.

Getting back to drones, Euan also said that there was a real threat to their usefulness from some of the current licensing restrictions on drone operations – which were drawn up by the Civil Aviation Authority mainly to control the use of UAVs near airports.

UAVs are limited to flying at a maximum height of 120m and a maximum of 500m from the controller – and this, he claimed, imposed a considerable limitation on their commercial use in agriculture where they could easily used over greater ranges without threat.

While he could see the point of many of the privacy laws associated with their use, he said that many of these weren’t suited to the field situation either.

With the cost of the high-spec' machine which was used by the Edinburgh University – and on display at the seminar – running close to £60,000, cost is another factor limiting the uptake of the technology.

But Dr Alasdair MacArthur, one of the senior researchers at the uni’s school of geosciences said that by deciding what information was important – and hence which pieces of equipment were actually required – a smaller drone costing a 10th of the price could give 80% of the information supplied by its more costly big brother.

Rather than having the thing bristling with dozens of different camera lenses and sensors, once it was worked out what data was actually useful, the equipment could be limited to what was required and this, too, would help pare down costs.

So, just like the pipers, the trick will lie in getting our drones carefully tuned to do what we want.