UAVs to increase agricultural productivity in Turkey

Turkey’s Agricultural Credit Cooperatives will create fleets of agricultural unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to save water and pesticides and increase the productivity in agriculture in every province of the country, Turkish media has reported.

Fahrettin Poyraz, General Manager of Agricultural Credit Cooperatives, said that with the use of drones, significant savings will be achieved in both water and pesticides. He stated that the use of ZIHA would provide serious gains both for the country and for the farmers. "Trials are being carried out with agricultural UAVs on 20 different products across 15 provinces. After the product-based results of the trial studies, we will hopefully create agricultural UAV fleets in our provinces" he said.

Due to their high price, the Credit Cooperatives will create the UAV fleets with the support of the Agriculture Ministry and farmers can use their services whenever needed, Poyraz mentioned.

Furthermore, Poyraz stressed the importance of the Agricultural Credit Cooperatives in supporting agriculture, especially from the financial point of view, underlining that there is a serious increase in interest rates, which needs to be altered.

In his words, work has been launched to transform the Agricultural Credit structure into an interest-free system. Instead of making more loans available, the Credit Cooperatives have switched to the method of providing agricultural inputs to the farmers through deferred sales.

In the next stage the Agricultural Credit Cooperatives intend to create and maintain the financial support of agriculture with an interest-free model by changing their own structure, transforming it or turning into a bank in the form of participation banking.

Poyraz said that the process is still in the preparation stage.

“I hope we will present our project to the authorities after we have it ready. This will happen in not too long time. Our next goal will be to transform the Agricultural Credit Cooperatives into an interest-free system and thus serve Turkish agriculture and farmers” he added.

For the first time in Turkey, spraying large agricultural lands by making multiple flights with agricultural drones was tried on a 100-decare paddy field in Samsun's Terme district. Thanks to this method, 100 acres of land were sprayed in 1.5 minutes with 10 agricultural drones that took off simultaneously.