Best Drones For Agriculture In [year]

When it comes to precision farming, one should definitely invest in the best drones for agriculture. We researched the market and tested each and every top drone in our lab before coming up with this list. Our rigorous testing suggests Best Drones For Agriculture is the best drone for farming in the market. It is easy to use and is known for its remarkable performance.

Best Drones For Agriculture

1. DJI Agras MG-1 – Best Crop Spraying Drone

DJI Agras MG-1 is one of the top-notch crop-spraying drones. It is much more than a large camera drone. It is engineered to effortlessly spray around 4,000-6,000 square feet area in around a short span of 10 minutes. For larger farms, you can use it in cycles but for smaller farms, they can do the job at once. Like other DJI products, this beautiful piece comes with minimal training and assembly.

What we like the most is the efficient eight rotor propulsion system. This system can carry 10kgs of chemical solution and cover up to 7-10 acres of land in less than an hour. The company boasts that their newer system is 40 times more efficient than manual spraying. The drone flies 8 meters per second and does proportion spray effectively. Another amazing feature is its automatic adjustments, it checks automatically the flow according to the current flight and environmental conditions. Its atomizing spray nozzles are chemical resistant and can go for thousands of operations without servicing or replacement.

The Agras is designed for peace of mind and responds precisely to pilot inputs. You get three flight modes in it smart mode, manual plus mode, and full manual mode. With this mode, you can select to have maximum and specific control over the agricultural mission. We prefer beginners to go for smart mode. For autonomous dusting missions, you can set the grids in DJI MG-1 pretty easily. The DJI machine is corrosion, dust, and water-resistant. This definitely makes it one of the durable and quality products. Furthermore, you can fold it for safe, easy transport and storage. We call it the best DJI drone for agriculture.

Bottom Line:

An amazing DJI drone that is specifically best for agricultural spraying. It has all the features to cover a small land or a huge land within less than an hour.

2. SenseFly eBee SQ – Best For Agriculture Use

The eBee SQ is one of the easy to fly fixed-wing drones. It has all the features from flight planning, flight management, and the best image processing software. It is designed specifically to work within the workflow and the senseFLY’s sequoia 5-spectrum sensor. Out of the 4 are spectral bands and one is a visible RGB band.  This one can be a wonderful investment in precision agriculture as it is designed to monitor crops in all the stages from the planting to the harvest stage. It is a good choice for anybody who is looking for a fixed-wing drone to cover larger acres of land very fast.

We tested it and found that it can cover hundreds of acres in one single flight. It is around 10 times more powerful than other quadcopter drones. The company boasts that it can easily go on more than thirty thousand missions in a day. Using the eBee flight, you can capture different kinds of data like topography, 3D mapping, soil temperature, soil H2O levels, plant counts, and different vegetative indices. The data that it collects can be processed using several software like AIRINOV, MicaSense Atlas, or Pix4Dmapper Ag/Pro to form vegetative index maps.

What else we liked in this is the eMotion Ag flight planning and its ground station software. Both of these makes the process of creating a flight much simpler. You just have to upload your field boundaries from the existing FMIS system to get started. It is the pilot’s duty to survey the mission, set the image resolution, and set the required image overlap. Next, the software can easily generate the optimum flight plan. With this drone for precision agriculture, you also get analytic software to process data.

Bottom Line:

An amazing drone for farming and precision agriculture. It can be a good choice for someone who wants to cover a large area and wants an easier flight plan.

3. Sentera NDVI Upgrade For DJI Drones

If you have an existing DJI drone and you want to do an agriculture survey, then you can opt for an NDVI camera that is an upgrade from Sentera. You can pair this upgrade with Mavic Pro, Inspire 2, Phantom series, and the other high-end DJI models. During the upgrade you have to install the NDVI camera at the lower part of the drone, leaving the stock camera untouched. This way your drone would be able to capture all the near-infrared images.

We tested it and even consulted the best professionals in the industry, the 1.2MP Sentara NDVI camera is known as one of the smallest and the lightest precision agriculture sensors available in the market today. Your flight performance would be smooth by just adding this small sensor. With the purchase, you get a free installation service. The Sentera people handle all the installation parts. With its exquisite features, you can get NIR photos for NDVI indexing and the fully-gimbaled colour camera photo for scouting. Moreover, it has a global shutter for distortion-free images. We tested and found that it gives accurate normalized difference red edge crop health maps and a few normalized difference vegetative index maps.

When you purchase the Sentera upgrade, you get a 1-year subscription to the field agent software that you can run on a desktop or a smartphone. The software best works to generate NDVI maps to get insightful data about crop health. Apart from this, it also provides elevation mapping, weed detection zone mapping, and crop population analysis.

Bottom Line:

The Sentera NDVI upgrade is one of the most affordable upgrades that you can fix with any DJI drone to make your drone one of the exquisite precision agriculture drones.

4. DJI Smart Farming Package

The DJI smart farming package is a kit that is made to make the existing drone technology fit for precision agriculture. In the package, you get a standard DJI M100 drone which has visual sensors and multispectral sensors. You also get a one-year free subscription to Data Mapper software. This software is used to create both 2D and 3D maps. Other than this, the software has many ways to analyze different kinds of crops and get an idea of different vegetative indices.

We felt that when you use different analysis tools you can get a better idea of the yield and crop condition and thereby you can make the best decisions. To make the flight easier, it comes with DataMapper Infield which is a ground desktop and mobile application. With this app, you can define the flight path coverage of the survey and add control points for better calibration. The best thing is you can see all the results on your mobile.

Overall experts say with this new farming DJI package you can do a professional-grade survey for your drones. The device comes fully assembled and is easy to fly. You will always get stable performance. You can significantly cover a large area, you get easy flight controls and the icing on the top is the easy analysis results. You can run this beauty for up to 35 minutes with a single battery charge.

Bottom Line:

A DJI drone for agriculture that comes with all features to click overlapping images and the software to analyze and process images.

5. Precision Hawk Scouting Package

The Precision Hawk is another amazing package that can be used for farming and for a better yield of crops. The crop scouting package has DJI Phantom 4 Pro and Precision Hawk flight analytics software. The package also has in-field flight monitoring software, visual sensors, data mapper light image processing software, and in-flight control app. The app is both mobile and desktop compatible. You can control the entire drone with your phone.

The Phantom 4 Pro is an amazing camera drone capable of surveying most of the tasks. To turn this package in to complete the crop surveying machine you need to pay extra. Expert professionals say these drones can improve production efficiency across the various precision farming operation. This is an actually affordable farming kit that can help every grower to get aerial results and a better analysis for the growth of the crop.

When we consulted the expert professional, they pointed everything is great but there are a tiny bit shortcomings too. To calculate the value of the images you have to buy the Datamapper algorithms separately and the other thing is it does not have any multispectral sensor to capture any kind of NDVI data. We would suggest this package to someone who has a decent area of the farm and needs something to analyze the quality on their own.

Bottom Line:

A DJI Phantom Pro drone coupled with all the necessary farming features.

6. Parrot Bluegrass Fields Agricultural Quadcopter

The Parrot Bluegrass field is a very comprehensive ready fly a drone. You can use it to scan the entire crop and to get a better picture of how well the farming workflow is going. Parrot Bluegrass Field is a drone solely for agriculture use and precision farming. It provides good insights to increase productivity and enhance the quality of the crops. The Parrot Bluegrass is a drone for agriculture spraying and it is actually a fixed-wing design.

This particular piece is an affordable drone used by many farmers for its spraying feature and other numerous features to increase the yield. We tested and found that this drone is easy to operate, it has an accurate camera. You can always get clear quality images using this. This is an easy to fly fixed-wing drone with a multispectral sensor and a high-resolution 14MP front RGB camera. To add on the easy features, it comes with a Parrot Fields mobile app to easily understand the field workflow.

Moreover, with the kit, you also get a full-access to Pix4Dfields desktop and cloud software. This softwares work very well to analyze the data of the crops. You get only a year’s free subscription with this.

Bottom Line:

A fixed-wing drone that comes in affordable pricing and one-year free image processing software.

Buying Guide – Things To Consider

Buying a drone for agriculture is a tough job. The market has a lot of variety and every brand boasts about its specialities and uniqueness. Choosing one without testing can be dangerous as it is indeed a heavy investment. You should know what is the latest technology, which drone would match your need, what is the work that you majorly what your drone to help in, and of course the pricing. If you do not know how to do all these things we have an in-detail buying guide for you. This guide is aimed to help you with your purchase. So, let’s start with it.

1. Types

Drones are mainly used by expert farmers and professionals to have a look at the crop. Experts suggest only going for fixed-wing or multi-rotor drones. These two are the best type as they offer all the necessary features a drone must have for precision agriculture needs.

A few farmers prefer fixed-wing drones because these drones can cover a larger area and they come with a longer flight time which means you can cover more area in the air than any multi-rotor drone. We would suggest you a fixed-wing drone if you are someone who has large open farms for scanning. Moreover, fixed-wing drones come with more payload. They can carry more than a multi-rotor which means they can have more sensors. This way they can capture more information in a single flight. Getting more information in a short time is always a better and desirable idea. Overall, reduce the total time to collect the data from acres of farmland. Moreover, they are not very expensive. You can get them between $4000 to $25,000. In this range they come with all the fittings and sensors, you need not buy anything separately.

Moving on to the multi-rotor drones, like the DJI latest models, they are most suited for precision farming. Experts consider them as the best drones to precisely observe small/contained farms and also for the 3D scanning of the crops and the various objects on the field. They are easily manoeuvrable. The disadvantage in them, when compared to fixed drones, is that the flight time for these drones is half that of the fixed drone. With this, you cannot cover large farmland at once, you need to do it in shifts. You can get multi-rotor drones anywhere between $1000 to $10,000. They are cheaper than the fixed drones but though have a professional camera with multi-spectral cameras and other software for easy image processing.

Contrary to it, a few farmers also buy more than one drone to adjust the cost. On the whole, we would suggest you go for a fixed-wing drone if you have huge open spaces and a straight path to cover. On the other hand, go for affordable multi-rotor drones if you have a small area and you need to do spot checking closely. Your goal should be to buy a drone that can integrate well with both the Farm Management Information System and Agronomy Management System.

2. Image Processing

This is one of the most vital components of imaging. A lot of imaging sensors are available in the market for different types of agriculture drones. The options start from $200 to $40,000 or even more for hyperspectral cameras. You want your drone to capture the best video/photo with its 4K sensors. The common and affordable sensors are the high-resolution camera that just takes the visible wavelength images. These cameras can also take near-infrared images when you pair them with the right filters. Make sure, the quad that you are choosing should have at least 12Megapizels. Moreover, your camera should also have a wider view angle and a fisheye lens. With this, you can capture a larger area in one single shot. The quality ones process the image so beautifully that all the image distortion is completely gone.

Other than this, in the market, you also get multi-spectral imaging sensors. They let you see things more clearly. They come out very handy when you need to check the crop or the ground when it’s wet to check how well the irrigation system is performing. The best image processing lens is the one that captures the visual band, near-infrared band, and NDVI band in one single flight. In addition to this, for better image processing you can pair the image processors with hotspots that can let you see the hotspot and measure the plant and the land change with temperature over a period of time. You can also detect the water presence with these sensors. These sensors come out very handy to spot crop damage during the drought and other seasonal changes.

A more advanced and latest image processing sensor is LIDAR. It uses precise remote sensing technology. It measures distance by illuminating a certain target area with a laser and then analyzing the reflected light. They will let you see the crop with ultra-precision. Although, these sensors are damn expensive. We only suggest these ones for professionals who do precision agriculture for humongous land areas.

3. Software

You got the drone but you definitely need software to analyze the data that you have collected from your drone. This is an important requirement that needs to be considered before purchasing any type of drone. The prices vary for different software and it all depends on the data that needs to be processed. You can go for a monthly package subscription software plan or you can even go for a one-time package. This software comes up very handy to provide maps, combine images together, for 3D mapping, measure vegetative indexes, etc.  A few drones come with this software and for a few of them, you need to buy separately. This all depends on your need. If you have to buy the advanced software that comes with 3D mapping all you need is to spend is $200 to $400 on this software.

4. Price

The price varies drastically when it comes to agriculture drones. You get it from $4000 to $30,000 or even more. The more images processor, sensors, and other accessories you add to it the more expensive it becomes. You have to look at the price with respect to the area you cover, the type of crop you grow, and also the output you get. Professionals should only invest in the top-notch quality and farmers who have a humongous land to look after. We have covered all the different varieties in different price ranges. You can choose anyone from the above as all of them are known to give you the best results always and forever.

Common Issues When Flying

When you buy a drone for solely agricultural purposes you need to know the commercial and consumer guidelines of your region. This is a must. Additionally, you also should know what are the problems that are faced by expert drone operators so that you do not do the same mistake. We have consulted a few professional agriculture drone operators and come with a list of common issues when flying an agricultural drone. We would highly recommend you to go through all of them to make sure you do not do the same.

1. Privacy

A lot of drones have been confiscated for taking photos of people unknowingly. A lot of the drones have also been hit by guns. This can happen to your drone also, although it’s unlikely. It is always better to be safe than sorry. When you use a drone to take recordings of your farmland, you should make sure it should not capture the images of your neighbour’s field as this could be considered unauthorized and it definitely violates the state privacy laws. In the US especially, the laws related to drones are extremely strict. More than 25 states of the US, has passed new regulations and have come with certain laws related to drones. This is the reason we would advise you to check with your local laws regarding the drone laws in your region.

2. Connectivity

Our research team suggested when it comes to flying drones you should make sure that there is good connectivity and bandwidth in your farmland. A lot of farmlands in the US have negligible connectivity or cell coverage. If this includes your land, then definitely you need to do a lot of background work. In case your land has no connectivity, then what you can do is store the images/video locally in the drone or a  nearby station and then upload them later when you come back to your office. Alternatively, we would also suggest you not go for a drone that needs a live connection at all times. A drone that needs a live connection needs to capture data because it is not good for agriculture.

3. Data Ownership

The image data generated by these agriculture drones can be used by a  lot of people and a lot of other farmers and agricultural professionals. Country officials, drone operators, land management people, land surveyors, etc can get a lot of images to access. You need to make sure that the data that you collected does not go into the wrong hands as it can damage your farmland.

For the data ownership, what you can do is need professional recommendations. A few things that you can do is you can hire someone to perform an aerial survey of the farm, process the images via a third party, and share the images with a third party. You should make sure the farmer or the landowner should always have ownership of the data generated by drones flying over your property. The right generated by these third parties should be read properly.

4. FAA Regulations & Operator Certification

The flying drone for agriculture is always a commercial idea as per the FAA. As per the law, the drone operators must have FAA operator training and also a remote pilot certificate before they can operate drones over your property.

5. EPA Regulations

The EPA body has the right to access the data generated by the drones flying over the property. This is a thing that you cannot survive without. The data retention and storage policies are very important and need to pay attention to.

6. Interference With Other Aircraft

If you are using your drone for several purposes like crop spraying you should inform the authorities of your region. You should file a flight plan with the local airport office before every flight so that you should not interfere with other manned aircraft.

7. Know Your Contract Rights

If you are a new drone operator or a new agriculture surveyor, you should consult a professional legal to set up your contracts. You should know your laws, your limits, drone flying techniques, precautions to take before flying a drone, and other safety measures and rules that you need to follow to fly a quad in your region.

What Is Precision?

Precision Agriculture or satellite farming or site-specific crop management is a process where a farm is managed that complies with information technology to make sure that the soil and crop receive exactly what they require for best productivity and health. The main aim of precision agriculture for farmland is to gain resources that aim to get maximum yield and ensure profitability, sustainability, and safeguard the environment. It also helps to keep the crop health steady across the fields.

Most of the precision agriculture services rely on the IT service, software, equipment, and other sources that produce real data about the condition of the crop, moisture in the soil and air, along with the labour costs, and the availability of the crop and other weather conditions. You need to look into a lot of things when you calculate data:

The first is the management data which tells you crop yield and other data that the data providers provide. The second is the equipment performance which is real-time feedback and logs that are provided by sensor-equipped with manned and unmanned equipment like tractors, spreaders, irrigation vehicles, etc. The third is the geotagged images that are taken for measuring crop health. Overall precision agriculture is growing by leaps and bounds globally.

Why Are Drones Used In Precision?

The use of drones to keep a check on agriculture farms is a new trend. It is highly-précised to get geotagged images from the air. The drones that are used for surveying fields that are less than 50 hectares are cheaper. For such field drones do satellite imaging, manned aircraft surveillance, and manned scouting. The data produced by drones is much more precise than the data generated by other drones. These data drastically helps to improve the performance of farms.

However, there are rumours that the new FAA rules will restrict the use of drones for agricultural purposes. It is because the new Part 107 rules suggest that the drone should only collect data that is within the visual lines of sight of the operator. This creates a huge problem for the farms that are larger than the visual line of sight. The data collected suggest most of the farms in the U.S. will benefit from this rule and only around 10% of farms will have an issue.

In precision agriculture, experts use drones to check the condition of fields, crops, and livestock. They do it with the following kinds of data:

• 3D/Volumetric data
• Weeds/insect presence
• Relative biomass assessing
• Crop disease
• Nutrients presence
• Number of plants
• Health of plants
• Height of plants
• Movements of animals(if any)

When these kinds of data are collected from the drone it is used to map the plantation process, do farming operations and measure out the yield. A few important places where this kind of data is used include:

• Phenology
• Leaf area indexing
• Classification of trees
• Senescence analysis
• Drought estimates
• Yield monitoring
• Plant stress monitoring
• Nitrogen needs
• Field surveillance
• Monitoring the health of the crop

Furthermore, to take more precise and fast action the drones are also used to generate orthomosaic images using agricultural software programs. The precision maps created by such software are very handy. These maps come in very handy to inform the farm operator what actions one should take like time for irrigation, time to provide nitrogen supply or time to spray. On the whole, the data provided by the drones tend to increase the yield by many folds.

How Drones Are Used To Survey Crops?

The process of collecting data using the drone is the same no matter which type of drone you are using. In general, the drone survey process has four steps:

1. Plan The Flight

The latest drones come with flight planning software to easily plan your flight. With this, you can draw a box around your field that you are going to survey. For this, you can use Google Earth or some other similar feature. Next, a flight plan would be created automatically for you. Next what you have to do is upload the flight path into the drone and you are good to fly. If you are flying on the new ground station you need not do anything but if you are using an older ground station you need to manually code.

2. Fly

Now, your flight is planned and your drone is all set to fly. The drone will fly and capture the images. Here you just have to fly the drone and it would automatically take images on its way using its cameras and different sensors. It also uses its GPS location. The drone lands automatically after finishing its work. On the other hand, if your drone is not equipped to take photos automatically, then somebody needs to take the images manually during the flight.

For manual shooting, make sure the images overlap and cover the needed area. The images should be clicked using the GPS location, not the time. The images need to overlap with each other by at least 70% to get the correct data.

3. Processing Of Images

This is the most challenging part. The images that you have clicked automatically or manually needs to be processed for collecting the data. The data collected would identify the crop health over time, figure out any spot anomalies, and the overall growth of the plant. It is a challenging task as each drone takes hundreds to thousands of visual, thermal, and multi-spectral images per flight. And to get the fruitful data all these images are stitched together, converted to 2D orthomosaic images, and later processed and analyzed carefully.

For all these, especial processing software and services are used. A few popular process imaging software is Pix4D, AgEagle’s Rapid, Postflight Terra 3D, Correlator 3D, Data Mapper, trembling etc. All this software turns aerial images into useful data. All these tools mentioned above have cloud-based processing so you need not worry about anything. Out of them, a few are general image processing platforms and a few are proprietary flying hardware. The proprietary ones are more precise and accurate.

Contrary to this, there is one more option. In case you do not want to do the processing on your own then what you can do is you can get it done in a drone processing centre. There are many data processing services that would generate the report for you and you do not need to work on the software on your own.

4. Review & Take Action

All the work is done. The reports are in your hand. Now is the time to assess and analyze the crop’s health in your field. You can easily check whether your crops need nitrogen or sprayer, how is the yield, issues with the water retention, health of the crop, classification of the trees, senescence analysis, etc. Whatever information you found, would definitely help you increase the yield and the health of the crop. For further help, you can also put this data in the farm management systems like MyAgCentral to get an overall idea of what all your crops need.

Why Are Drone Preferred For Precision Over Other Aerial Imaging Systems?

Around 80% of the global drone revenue is because of agriculture. Drones offer a lot of advantages for crop monitoring when compared to other aerial imaging systems. There are many reasons for it a few of them are  discussed below in detail:

1. Affordable: Drones can capture images for fields less than 50 acres in size. They come out less expensive for small fields than the satellites or manned aircraft surveillance.

2. Precise: The drone cameras give a clear image of every centimetre. This way they can tell you the exact detail of the crop and the farm.

3. Early results: The drones survey more frequently than other methods that are how they will tell you more frequently what are the weeds, insects, or other abnormalities in the crop.

4. 3D Volumetric Data: The drone images can tell you the exact amount of piles, holes, hills, and patches in the field. You can detect the exact volume of issues in any kind of field using this volume data.

5. Frequent Reporting: As drones are cost-effective. You can use them any number of times to monitor your fields. They measure various crop indexes easily like the CCCI index, CWSI indes, and NDVI index.

On a regular basis, using these techniques the farmer can catch the problems faster and can act more quickly as per the need. This way the drones help to save thousands of acres of crops from going bad. Most of the farmers use a more accurate and detailed picture of the crops. They form their own crop management strategies to get effective results.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What are the kinds of drones used?

For agriculture generally, fixed-wing or multi-rotor drones are used. Fixed wings are used to cover large areas and the multi-rotor are used to cover smaller farms. The fixed ones have a longer flight time.

2. What are the benefits of using it?

Drones help the farmers drastically. It addresses the crop yield issues and the growth of the plants. These drones help to increase the yield, help in agriculture adaption during climate changes, and also work on reducing pollution.

3. How many acres can cover?

A drone that flies at 45km/hour can cover up to 100 acres in a span of 20 minutes. The battery life of agricultural drones is manufactured keeping in mind the need to cover one full land in one single flight.

4. Where are they used?

In agriculture, drones are used for soil analysis, field analysis, seed planting, crop spraying, spot spraying, crop mapping, crop surveying, irrigation monitoring, real-time livestock monitoring, etc.

5. How much does it cost?

The drones that are used by farmers can come anywhere between $2000 to $25,000 or even more. The cost is so high because most of them are made to meet the industrial needs and have exclusive built-in features to gather data and do crop analysis.

6. How many farmers use it?

As per the Munich Reinsurance America survey, it says not many farmers are doing it. It is because a lot of them have privacy issues, cyber security issues and then issues with injury or damage to drones. On the whole, half the farmers are not sure whether to use drones for their farms. They are still figuring out ways to use them effectively for improving yield.

Final Talk

The drone provides frequent and better resolution than satellites or other manned aircraft. They can fly lower and on a huge land pretty easily. Another advantage of the best drone for agriculture is that they can do frequent scanning in a portable and cost-effective way. Moreover, you can use different software to select a GPS location and fly the drone as per the selected map without a manned operator. Drones are globally used as the best means to monitor agricultural farms, livestock remotely and to identify the issues in the pasture land. The top drones are a boon fr agricultural farms. They not only tell you the upcoming crop threat, increase yield, and also prepare the farm for the next cropping season.