Mr. Holt,
While many parts of your story are true to the reality of
the situation, your article unfortunately contains a number of misleading/false
statements so I wanted to call them to your attention. I request that you make
the necessary corrections to your article.
1) The term UAS is never used is this article.
While most people know
(or think they know) what a “drone” is, that is not the proper term to describe
unmanned aerial systems (UAS). UAS are not just platforms as the term “drone”
implies. Rather they are platforms, sensors, ground control stations, pilots
& observers, and many other components. My standard procedure is to mention
the term “drone” once and then use UAS to more accurately describe these tools
when writing for the general public. UAS is the term used by the FAA.
2) Is the future of farming a
quadcopter?
We are not using a
quadcopter. We are using a fixed wing UAS from Precision Hawk the closely resembles a
radio controlled aircraft. Quadcopters have a very short battery life which
doesn’t allow them to cover very many acres per flight. In the long-term they
will likely not be the most common agricultural UAS even though there are
currently many people trying to use them for farming purposes.
3) A farmer needs to check on her crops—making sure
they’re coming up free of pests and weeds and ensuring the health of the soil.
Instead of grabbing a pair boots to venture into the fields on foot, the farmer
grabs a joystick and kicks back on the couch. The low hum of an unmanned aerial
vehicle—a drone—flying over the farm replaces the crunch of soil beneath the
farmer’s feet. As the farmer navigates the drone, visual, thermal, and
multispectral cameras send vital information about the crops back to a nearby
computer. More pesticide here, less irrigation there; the harvest will start in
this block and wrap up in that one. All that information and more is gathered
by drone, without the farmer needing to step outside.
This is not a realistic
expectation. We (a pilot and a visual observer) are required by the FAA to be
within line of site during all UAS operations in order to monitor the safety of
our UAS flights and be in direct contact with air traffic control in case of an
emergency. Also ‘boots on the ground’ (either the farmer’s or a crop consulting
company’s) will always be needed on some level to ground-truth the UAS imagery.
Furthermore the complexity of processing the images to a usable form, figuring out
what management decisions can or should be made (if any), and those decisions
actually being put into use by farmers are still in the very early research stages.
Any “farmer” who thinks they can or will be able to sit on the couch and farm
by remote control won’t be farming long. I realize you are trying to put an
impactful image into people’s minds to catch and keep their interest, but this
is nowhere near the reality representing UAS current or future use. Like most tasks
in farming it’s going to take a lot of work and attention to detail to do it
safely and effectively.
4)
The two Cornell Cooperative Extension
field-crops specialists, Bill Verbeten and Mike Stanyard, will begin flying
their Precision Hawk UAV over fields in Genesee County, and they hope to gain
clearance to use it across 10 counties next year.
We have authorization for a small
set of farm fields at a single location in Genesee County, not the entire
county. All of our applications are for very specific locations and we are
working very closely with those farms. This issue comes up again later in the
article.
5)
“At the end of the day, we hope to learn
if we can replace some of our tasks that take a lot of time on the ground,”
said Verbeten, who works with both the Niagara County CCE and the Northwest New
York Dairy, Livestock & Field Crops Team.
Mike
and I work with the Northwest
New York Dairy, Livestock & Field Crops Team and our offices are in Wayne
County and Niagara County respectively. These counties, and the other eight we officially
work in, pay to receive the services of our regional Extension team (and in
many cases other regional teams) instead of only having local staff which used
to be commonplace. We are employees of Cornell University, not the local
counties.
6) The duo is clearly enthused about drones’ potential to
cut man-hours spent inspecting fields while producing highly scientific crop
analysis, but not everyone shares their excitement. Elizabeth Henderson, who
for 30 years has farmed organic vegetables in Wayne County, N.Y.—one of the
counties where the Cornell team hopes to fly drones next year—doesn’t plan on
allowing them to fly over her fields. She says a farmer with less than 20 acres
doesn’t need a drone, because that farmer “knows the land by being on it and
seeing it foot by foot regularly, even daily.” Drones, she believes, will
primarily benefit large-scale, industrial agriculture.
We
will not be flying Ms. Henderson’s or any other farmers field without their
permission in writing. We have and continue to receive widespread support for
this work from most of the farming community and we are doing it abiding by
every rule and protocol that we can. Again we only have authorization for very
defined areas on hand-picked farms that go through a very thorough approval
process. A farmer with less than 20 acres will be able to benefit from UAS work
once the commercial rules are in place and best management recommendations are
established. Provided they meet the criteria the FAA puts in place for commercial
UAS rules, small farms will be able to use UAS for many task including:
·
Taking
promotional videos/photos to interact with customs online.
·
Potentially
detecting diseases, insect, & weed pressure along with crop nutrient status
in high value crops grown on small acreage such as hops, grapes, & fruit
trees (in addition to vegetable & traditional field crops).
·
Monitoring
livestock health and behavior.
There is value to
walking the land (and there will continue to be for larger farms as well), but
the human eye can’t see thermal images, NDVI (from a multispectral scanner), or
even the resolution of a visual scan, much less analyze the data. The
technological innovations that led to small UAS creation in the first place actually
levels the playing field across farms of all sizes.
7) “Use of drones will help consolidate control of
farming inputs in the hands of the largest corporations and complete the total
information in the hands of the government about what we farmers are doing on
our land,” says Henderson, who has been on the board of the Northeast Organic
Farming Association of New York since 1989. “The footstep of the farmer is the
best fertilizer.”
We are not (nor are
others in agriculture) giving information obtained by UAS scans from farmer
fields away to the government. We will be working with many parties within Cornell
University to evaluate their data and the potential to use it to improve
farming practices. We fully respect the farmer’s privacy and this is a conspiracy
theory without ground to stand on.
Farmer scouting and monitoring of fields is
not fertility management. Those processes are governed by chemistry, biology,
and physics on all farms (regardless of philosophical differences) and the
statement is blatantly misleading and false. Plants can only use what is
available to them and unless a farmer applies fertilizer in some form
(including manures, composts, commercial fertilizers, etc.) or a given
essential plant nutrient happens to already be in the soil it doesn’t matter
how often a farmer looks at/walks a field.
8) Drones, she says, will consolidate control among
large-scale agriculture by calibrating more precisely the amount of fertilizer
or herbicides needed—a problem she and her fellow small-scale, organic farmers
don’t have.
Again this statement
is untrue on a number of levels. Many market forces are part of the
consolidation phenomenon that occurs in all industries over time, it’s simply
part of the natural cycle of markets. UAS imagery has a long way to go before
being able to be consistently useful at the farm level and will almost
certainly not be a factor that trumps current market forces in agriculture
leading to consolidation of farms.
We work with a number
of organic farms that are very interested in calibrating their fertilizer
levels and have a strong interest in evaluating/eventually using UAS to better
manage their crops. Even at a small scale, organic farms will have many reasons
to operate UAS use as described above under item 5. Also these statements
(5,6,& 7) falsely give the impression that we are not working with organic
farms—nothing could be further from the truth. We are trying to evaluate UAS
across many farm types throughout our region in order to effectively serve our
diverse farming community.
If you require further clarification or have additional
questions do not hesitate to contact me on this topic.
Have a great day.
Regional Extension Agronomist
NWNY Dairy, Livestock, and Field Crops Team
Cornell Cooperative Extension
(585)313-4457 cell
Twitter: Bill Verbeten @BillVerbeten
