This is a bit of an odd one, but looking for suggestions.
I’ve been asked to survey a field, as a crop is not growing as it should, and the farmer is blaming the manufacturer of the weed and bug killer he has sprayed on it. There’s a court case pending. Anyway, the field is huge. I considered using waypoints, but found that I can’t unless I’m using hyper lapse, which might not be appropriate. I don’t think I will be able to do it using line of sight, as the field/crop is somewhat repetitive. I’m not certain that one shot from above is going to work, as I’ll have to show the specific areas in which there are problems.
I’ve not been to see the actual field yet, and can’t decide even if this is something I want to be involved in, but just in case - has anyone got any clever ideas…? Please…
Litchi or Dronelink are most common low cost tools, but there’s also Map Pilot Pro and more exotic and very expensive high end professional tools like Drone Deploy and DJI’s Terra, but serious investment in time and money needed here. It depends what you want to do.
I’m no expert, just taking baby steps trying out Dronelink beta for the Mini 3 Pro for fun. Which drone would you use? That is likely to dictate what you can and can’t do - crop monitoring seems to use specialist cameras in some areas, although weeds may be easy to observe with normal vision. Also, are you already set up for commercial work? You’d need commercial insurance for this I would think.
Who does he buy his crop protection from? There’s not many sole traders in the world that have won a court case against the likes of Bayer, Syngenta, et al. There’s a reason their revenues are all in excess of $40bn a year
How many hectares? And what crop was he growing, Diane?
Regular aerial photographs won’t show the court anything, you’ll need precise geo-referenced NDVI readings with a 20mm accuracy.
Years ago we used use fixed wing drones (the Parrot Disco) and Sequoia cameras, or the Phantom 4 RTK, also with a sequoia camera attached to it, fields were route- mapped using Skippy Scout: How it works - Skippy Scout
You could hire some multispectral kit for the job. Heliguy have something that’ll do the job for £370
(It’s RTK too, see if your grower has either his own existing base station, or access to a neighbours - a good base installation will cover a 30km radius).
There’s potential a cheaper option for your grower, but it’ll do you out of a job. See which FMIS package they use, it might have a satellite option available. Sentinel2 data is free but it’s only 10m resolution. Planet (labs) offer 3m data but it’s quite expensive. Not as expensive as a lost crop though
Depends on the drone you are using, if its capable of running a mapping mission, I have being doing this type of work for a while now, and use both satellite imagery and drone imagery to cross reference the derived data, do you have a coordinate of the field, I can provide you up to date imagery if you like.
Thank you all for your responses. I’ve decided that it’s too risky for me to do. I don’t much fancy ending up in court having done something wrong. I’d have been using either the mini3 pro, or the Air 2 - The more I spoke to the ‘client’ the less I liked what was going on… and wasn’t prepared to rent the multispectral. I used to work in the insurance sector, so sadly am aware of all the things that can (and usually do) go wrong further down the line… I’m leaving this one alone… thanks for your help anyway… there were some good ideas in there.
