Uncover the real problem
THERE aren’t too many cropping farmers out there who haven’t been reduced to scratching their heads in wonder about one area of a field doing so much worse than another.
In what appears to be the same soil, weather and moisture conditions, the yield in one corner can be inexplicably worse or better than an area just 20 or 30m away.
Queensland Drones chief executive officer Tony Gilbert believes he has not only the explanation but also the solution to problems of this sort.
While he agreed it was a little strange for a drone company to work in soil testing, Mr Gilbert said it turned out to be a natural progression.
He said Queensland Drones started out offering things like water flow and accumulation maps, as well as aerial crop health imaging, but soon noticed a gap in the market.
And in a perfectly serendipitous set of circumstances, it turned out one of the team members had extensive experience in electromagnetic conductivity mapping.
The technology allows users to get a highly accurate reading of factors like soil type, condition, salinity levels and density down to a very small area, meaning farmers could target specific parts of a field with problems rather than treating the whole area at a higher cost.
He used the example of a Sunshine Coast strawberry farmer who had
electromagnetic maps of his property that he hadn’t previously put to use.
Mr Gilbert and his team saw clear sections of varying crop health and yield over the field.
Several months later they returned to the property and the farmer had harvested his strawberries and replaced them with a crop of brussels sprouts.
The exact same crop health pattern could be seen in the brussels sprouts as they
observed in the strawberries.
When they overlaid the electromagnetic map, it was easy to see and fix problem soil areas.
Another farmer planting pineapples in a clay-heavy field would routinely add gypsum to the entire paddock, but after electromagnetic mapping it was discovered he could halve his gypsum application by targeting it to just areas with clay in them.
The best news is that it’s
not something likely to change from year to year, so farmers will only need to carry out the testing every five to 10 years, so long as the topsoil isn’t washed away.
“One of the reasons we ended up going this way was we have a data scientist on our team and he had 10 years of doing this under his belt and we didn’t even realise,” Mr Gilbert said.
“It’s about us being able to round off our product set,
because before we had a product set that saw the issues but had no solutions.”
He said Darling Downs farmers were among the most innovative he’d seen and he was interested in working more with them to see how the new innovations, like GPS tractors, would affect both soil health and agriculture as a whole in the future.
To find out more, head to www.qlddrones.com.au or find them on Facebook.