Drones drive grains research
AUSTRALIAN broadacre farmers are to benefit from increasing development and investment in grain sorghumfocused Agtech.
Agtech funding is a hot topic in the broadacre industry and investment has increased significantly in the past 12 months with government investors, corporates and farmers driving significant innovation, focus and funding.
Pacific Seeds is investing in a range of technologies to deliver more robust and efficient solutions to farmers.
Pacific Seeds plant breeder Solomon Fekybelu said the company was introducing multispectral imaging and drone technology into its grain sorghum breeding programs, which would rapidly speed up data collection.
“These innovative technologies are making the collection of data a more precise process,” Dr Fekybelu said.
“Tasks that used to take hours and even days to complete, now only take 20 minutes or so and can be completed at multiple stages during the crop cycle.
“Drone multispectral imaging technologies use green, red, red-edge and near infrared wavebands to capture both visible and invisible images of crops and vegetation.
“In the future we will be able to explore traits that simply are not possible to investigate with the current manual process due to the physical impediments of doing so.
“These technologies will speed up the development of comprehensively tested grain sorghum product that will be most relevant to changing climatic conditions.”
Dr Fekybelu said the next phase of implementation was focused on developing the best possible software and mathematical algorithms to enable breeders to analyse and interpret the significant amount of data now at our fingertips.