Drone tech cuts use of pest chemicals

Hailed as way forward globally

DRONE technology can help farmers reduce their use of pest-control chemicals by up to 30%, according to Jean Kuiper, owner of Rosenhof Organic Farm at Elgin, in the Western Cape.

The reduction would result in lower levels of stress in crops and healthier harvests.

Rosenhof produces organic vegetables, apples, pears and raspberries, and freerange chickens.

Kuiper uses drone technology from Aerobotics, a Cape Town-based data analytics company, as a tool to improve agricultural production. She said farmers understood the value of the company’s Aeroview Scout app, as it reduced chemical input by up to 30%.Aerobotics, through its cloud-based web app, uses aerial imagery and machine-learning algorithms to optimise crops for farmers around the world, and is setting the standard for crop analytics globally. Aerobotics was started in 2014 by Benjamin Meltzer and James Paterson.

Kuiper said one needed to understand that the healthier the crop, whether fruit from a tree or potatoes, the more resistant it was to insects.

She said insecticides and fungicides were not healthy for plants.

Kuiper said all insecticides killed the predators of pests. “So if you reduce the amount of insecticide you spray on crops, the natural predators will stand a better chance of survival. We need to improve soil health to improve human health, and the less chemicals we use, the less toxic we make it.”Aeroview Scout enabled farmers to make in-field findings with a wifi connection. “That information is invaluable to the farmer, because he knows which orchard has a particular problem and sprays accordingly,” said Kuiper.

“He doesn’t just go and spray the whole lot, he sprays what he needs to, and immediately he will drop his chemical input by 30%. That’s our experience on the farm.”

Paterson said Aerobotics, situated in Woodstock, entered into a partnership with Nedbank, which allowed his company to continue expanding and working on new

THE IN-DEPTH DATA HAS THE REAL POTENTIAL TO EVENTUALLY TRANSFORM FARMING

“We partnered with the business to conduct an initial experiment by flying drones over the pecan nut farms of one of our prospective agricultural clients.”

The high-resolution drone data that was collected was used to calculate tree health and tree canopy size.

“Our collaboration with Aerobotics has enabled us to expand the value of this data for farmers.

“The in-depth data is also proving useful in terms of our own client assessments and, ultimately, is delivering effective, scalable holistic agriculture solutions that have the real potential to eventually transform farming and agriculture finance in South Africa, the rest of Africa and even the world.

“For us, the results we are seeing from the Aerobotics project epitomise the real value and power of disruption, done right.

“We believe that true disruptors are those organisations that are able to see through their traditional roles and functions and create new realities for their clients and their businesses.”