The National Agricultural Aviation Association (NAAA) is begining a UAV safety campaign aimed at the agriculture community. The goal of the campaign is to raise awareness and prevent accidents between UAV operators and low-altitude manned aircraft. The first step of the campaign was to create a UAV “safety stuffer,” a double-sided insert that illustrates safety concerns of pilots about hard-to-see UAVs. The … Read More
Peanut Research Future Includes Georgia Tech
Georgia Tech is new to the peanut research world but Doug Britton who manages the Agricultural Research Program at the university believes they are bringing a new perspective and expertise to the table. “Georgia Tech has a great engineering and science faculty,” said Britton. “A lot of things that we develop are in manufacturing or other aspects of engineering and … Read More
Farm Bureau Releases Drones in Ag Study
The American Farm Bureau Federation, together with drone solutions company Measure, have released a study that identifies and quantifies the benefits of drone technology in precision agriculture. “While lots of drone hardware has been sold to farmers, until today no tool existed to help growers actually quantify whether the benefits exceed their costs, especially when farmers want to outsource these … Read More
Got Drone? Get Interdrone
Got Drone? Want Drone? Then plan to attend Interdrone! It’s Interdrone, the International Drone Conference & Expo, taking place in Las Vegas, September 9-11. AgWired is a media sponsor for Interdrone and I hope to attend the show to provide coverage right here and on Precision.AgWired.com. I talked with Ted Bahr, President/CEO, BZ Media, the company that is conducting the … Read More
Corn Farmers Learn About Drones
National Corn Growers Association president Chip Bowling got a first-hand drone demo in his home state of Maryland last week. The demonstration was one of several educational tours for NCGA board members highlighting advances in technology and sustainability, as well as diversified farming operations. Bowling, left, got a lesson in flying an unmanned aerial system from Matthew Creger of Maryland-based … Read More
High Def Corn Planting
Via Twitter alert from Robert Frye comes, “Iowa Corn Planting In High Definition.” Robert is obviously a drone pro judging by how he commanded his quad copter to take this gorgeous video. He published it on May 11, 2015. Here’s how he described it on YouTube: A “birds-eye-view” of Jim, Matt and Jay’s 2015 corn planting. Please watch on full … Read More
Nova Scotia Firm Partners with PrecisionHawk
AerHyve Aerial Technologies specializes in analyzing data from UAVs for use in precision ag. This Nova Scotia based company has recently announced a partnership with world leaders in UAV remote sensing and GIS data processing-PrecisionHawk. By working together AerHyve customers will have access to PrecisionHawk’s hardware and software and AerHyve will gain exposer in an emerging market. “We value AerHyve … Read More
Agribotix Gets Grant for Ag Drone Data Work
A pioneer company in drone data collection and analysis has won a $250,000 award from Colorado’s Advanced Industry Program. Agribotix provides farmers with a cloud-based software platform for decoding data collected by drones to provide results intended to improve yields and reduce costs. The grant comes from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, with the purpose of … Read More
FAA Announces UAS Center of Excellence
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last week announced the selection of Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence ASSURE, a consortium of universities headed by Mississippi State University (MSU), to lead the newly-designated FAA Center of Excellence for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS COE). ASSURE is tasked with identifying issues critical to the integration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) … Read More
Crop Analytics Plan wins MIT $100K
The ‘Granddaddy’ of all business plan competitions, the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, has selected a crop analytics business plan as the winner. The Robert P. Goldberg $100,000 grand prize winner was awarded to Raptor Maps – a startup drone technology business with the goal of feeding a growing world population. The team, consisting of three PhD candidates from MIT, beat … Read More