“Farming is a difficult line of work, and in addition to being out in the field all day, farmers have slim profit margins,” Nguyen said. “Increasing crop yield through precision agriculture is important.”

Using AI, Nguyen is working to program smart drones to fly on their own and capture photos of the fields. Stitching these photos together creates a mosaic farmers can use to monitor their fields for infection with the incurable blueberry scorch virus or infestation with Carolina redroot weeds that crowd out cranberry vines.

“Early detection of disease and preventive measures achieved by using AI and smart drones, like precision spraying, can improve results,” Nguyen said. “A lot of people don’t realize that underneath the hood, all these AI models are generated using math.”

Even in the absence of diseases and weeds that can overtake bogs, AI models that count berries allow farmers to estimate their crop yield in advance. Accurate early estimations help farmers determine how much labor will be needed to pick the fruit and negotiate prices with distributors. Nguyen has undertaken these efforts with grant funding from the New Jersey Department of Agriculture and, in collaboration with Camden County College and the New Jersey Council of County Colleges.

“Although its use in this field has been under-investigated, AI has an important role to play in New Jersey agriculture,” Nguyen said. “What we’re doing will benefit farmers, as well as open up opportunities for our students to gain field experience flying the drones and collecting data.”

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“We’re now expanding that capability to all the public soybean breeding programs in the region,” said Rainey, professor of agronomy, who also directs the Purdue Soybean Center. Soon, she and Cherkauer will begin receiving drone imagery collected on a panel of 1,200 soybean varieties that breeders have planted in 11 states across the U.S. north-central region.

“Here at Purdue, we’ll do all the processing and modification of the images to predict biomass,” she said.

The effort is part of the SOYGEN3 (Science Optimized Yield Gains across ENvironments) project. Consisting of eight universities, including Purdue, SOYGEN3 has more than $900,000 in funding from the North Central Soybean Research Program.

“The overarching goal in this experiment is to develop methods and models for selecting soybeans that will be high yielding in future extreme environments under climate-change scenarios,” Rainey said. “We know that the future environments we’re going to grow soybean in are different from the ones we have now because climate is changing.

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is proposing a new rule that would require any drone user to connect to the internet and broadcast a signal to alert others of its presence and identification.

Nearly 29 percent of farms and ranches do not have access to the internet, so the rule stands to diminish the potential of this technological tool.

“Requiring drones to connect to the internet and broadcast a signal would remove one of the newest tools in the toolbox for farmers and ranchers during a time when they have already seen a drastic 50 percent decline in net farm income in the last four years,” the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) said in a news release.

The AFBF is working with the FAA to provide flexibility to farmers and ranchers who lack adequate internet.

Source: AgWeb