Going aerial without breaking the bank

Glacier FarmMedia – Any farmer can get into the drone game, according to Matthew Johnson, vice-president at Volatus Aerospace. And with the current price of a minidrone, with its functionality and ease of use, he says it’s kind of crazy not to.

“I’ve been saying it for a long time. Since (the) mini came out, I think every farmer and agronomist should have a microdrone.”

Johnson is in charge of all education and agricultural programs at the Ontario-based aerospace company, which offers operator training and custom drone services across industries ranging from mining and agriculture to public safety and defence.

He doesn’t dispute the more advanced drone uses in farming — those that are often the purview of custom services — but farmers should not dismiss the smaller cousins of those heavy, large and more regulated machines, he said.

Microdrones will not deliver a payload of herbicide to a crop. Annual crop growers won’t send them to the field fitted with a multispectral camera to get field-level zone mapping to detect underlying disease or soil issues. Nor will livestock producers strap on a thermal camera to detect changes in animal body temperature as a sign of illness.

Chances are, the microdrone will be limited to an ordinary, high-resolution RGB camera, said Johnson, and for a lot of uses, that’s enough.

“It’s an incredible tool. We’ve never been able to get the aerial perspective (before), other than having a helicopter or a plane fly over the fields. You have the ability to get a different perspective for a few hundred dollars.”

A bird’s eye view is enough for a livestock producer to monitor a herd or watch individual animal behaviour. For crops, it’s an extension of the farmer’s own scouting, useful to see pests, disease symptoms or other issues that could stunt crop growth.

“You can see spots on the leaves, cracks in the soil or puddles of water that would explain why everything’s dying,” he said. “Whatever it is, that just saves you a bunch of time and driving through your field and crashing a bunch of plants while you’re doing it.”

Something as simple as taking weekly aerial photos of fields can help track crop progress and identify patches of concern, he noted.

Johnson gave the DJI Phantom Mini 4 Pro microdrone as an example.

“You can take this thing out and get it ready to launch within two minutes,” he said. “You can fly up to 400 feet and go out and take a look at your field. Take a picture, see there’s an area that you didn’t know wasn’t very healthy, fly down, get it really close up, five feet away, and get a super high-resolution picture.”

Regulations

Johnson knows a thing or two about drones in agriculture; it’s been a subject of his work since 2015 and he is the architect of many courses on drone use and machine learning technology on the farm. A decade ago, the process of flying a drone of any weight was onerous.

“When drones came out, they caught regulators by surprise, and they didn’t have time to properly create regulations to manage this brand-new type of aircraft,” he said.

“So, they just said, ‘if you want to fly a drone, you have to apply for a special flight operation certificate (SFOC) from Transport Canada.’”

That was a ball of red tape that most producers had neither the time nor inclination to untangle. First came a ground school class. After that, operators had to write an SFOC application and submit it to Transport Canada.

“It was long,” Johnson recalled. “My first one was 50 pages of really detailed descriptions of my drone, my understanding of all the safety parameters of the drone and how I’m going to conduct my operations.”

It soon became clear to regulators that changes were needed.

In 2019, regulations were eased for smaller, more basic drones. Under the older rules. anyone piloting a drone between 250 grams and 25 kilograms still had to have a valid drone pilot certificate and only fly drones that were marked and registered. There were basic and advanced levels within that category.

The new rules removed the requirement for a special licence within that weight range, while leaving restrictions for drone use around controlled airspaces like airports.

A lot of bells and whistles can be strapped to a 25-kg drone, including the aforementioned multispectral or LiDAR cameras. Those looking at drones for precision spraying must still deal with heavier regulations. Those often weigh around 100 kg and still require an SFOC.

The 2019 regulation changes also created a sub-250-gram category: the microdrone. That weight limit included anything (like a camera) attached to the drone. Should the equipment fall under that weight limit, it does not have to be registered, does not require a certificate to fly and is essentially unregulated.

That said, Transport Canada’s website warns that microdrone operators are expected to behave responsibly and exercise caution while their drone is in the air.

“While there are no prescriptive elements of the regulations, there is an expectation that the pilot of a microdrone use good judgment, identify potential hazards, and take all necessary steps to avoid any risks associated with flying your drone,” the department states.

Those safe pratices, according to Transport Canada, include the following:

• Maintain the drone in direct line of sight.
• Do not fly your drone above 400 feet in the air.
• Keep a safe lateral distance between your drone and any bystanders.
• Stay far away from aerodromes, airport, heliport and waterdromes.
• Avoid flying near critical infrastructure such as utilities, communication towers or bridges.
• Stay clear of aircraft at all times.
• Do a pre-flight inspection of your drone.
• Keep the drone close enough to maintain the connection with the remote controller.
• Avoid special aviation or advertised events.

Drone advancements

Drones in general have become less expensive and more advanced, Johnson noted.

“For $1,000, you can get an incredible piece of technology that seven or eight years ago would have cost you $10,000 to get an equivalent quality of data.”

He specifically pointed to technology from DJI. He does not work for that company but is impressed by it, he added. It has the lion’s share of the commercial drone sales market despite new competitors.

A Jan. 18 article on 2024’s best incoming drones, published by PC Magazine, gave top spot in seven of its nine categories to DJI. Autel Robotics took the other two spots.

“The first one that came out four or five years ago was decent; we used it for training and stuff like that, but it didn’t have a great camera,” Johnson said, adding that DJI’s second-generation microdrone was marginally better and the third generation had significant improvements.

“They had a way better operating interface; the drone was more responsive, more powerful, had a better sensor on it, and could fly longer,” Johnson said.

The company’s fourth effort also had improvments, “but it’s not as big of a difference between the three and the four as between the two and the three. So you can get by, I think, with the three and still have a really good system,” he said.

A quick internet search lists prices for the latest DJI drone between $1,400 and $1,600. Doing the same for the third-generation model dropped retail prices to between $600 and $800.