As the weather gets increasingly extreme, farmers are looking for ways they can still maintain crop yields while minimising field damage.
Here in the UK, February 2024 was one of the wettest on record with an average rainfall of 140mm.
And this just compounds the problems for farmers that work low lying areas of land.
So it wasn’t a surprise when we got a call from a farmer in the south of England whose winter wheat needed some nitrogen, but he struggles with traveling on his land at the best of times.
So naturally, he was keen to see if drone application could work for him, so the AutoSpray team loaded up the big XAG P100 drone and jumped in the truck.
When we arrived, it was clear that the ground was too wet to apply anything within DEFRA’s guidelines to prevent water pollution, but we thought a demonstration using water would prove the point nicely.
Let’s face it, we didn’t think they’d notice another 100 litres of water per hectare!
The trial field was a little over 3 hectares and the recommended application rate was 100L/Ha, so that was how we set things up.
Over next 80 mins the P100 pro sprayed 320 litres over the saturated land, but the new, P100 Pro drones that are on their way to us would get the job done in less than half that time.
When you consider that the alternative would be to do this on a quadbike with a small boom, I guarantee that the drone would get the job done before you’d even finished digging the quad out from it’s first run! And off course, the drone won’t leave a single rut.
From the discussions after the demo, it sounds like a few farmers will be adding a drone to the spray shed in the very near future…
Note – the conditions in the field meant that a demonstration with water was the best approach.
source
Thanks for sharing 😎