Applications of Drones in Agriculture

Abstract

Through history, agriculture has played a fundamental role in the economy of El Salvador because of its contribution to the Gross Domestic Product, export of agricultural products such as coffee, cotton and maize, among others. It has been an important source of incomes and employments, mainly in the rural area. Nevertheless, the Salvadoran agricultural sector has had a poor performance in the last decades.

According to the Salvadorian Chamber of Small and Medium Agricultural Producers, some of the current problems Salvadorian agriculture face are: Phyllachora maydis plague, rust, El Niño and La Niña phenomena, coffee borer beetle plague. All of them have drastically affected the agricultural productivity in the last years.

Regarding this issue, it was analyzed how the implementation of drones in agriculture contributes with precision a better development of this task through the utilization of applications that allow autonomous and remote monitoring as well as the detection of hydric stress; herbicides local treatments, detection of nutritional stress, plants counting and early detection of illnesses and plagues. This is possible because advanced drones have cameras or multispectral, thermic and tele-detection sensors that capture images of the plantations in order to process and analyze them later through a specialized software on precision farming which is provided, most of the times, by the drone manufacturer.