Aerial Imagery Offers High-Tech Scouting Options
Instead of spending hours trudging through wheat, barley, and potato fields hoping he gets a good idea of what overall field health looks like, Brad Nielson takes a bird’s eye view, saving him time and boot tread, writes Sonja Gjerde at Syngenta’s Thrive Magazine. Aerial imagery aids diagnosis for Nielson, an agronomist for Walters Produce in Newdale, ID, making his scouting more efficient. “In a year like this, imagery pays for itself in crop quality and crop health,” he says. Nielsen relies on FarmShots, a satellite imagery platform that integrates scouting and variable rate prescriptions for farmers, agronomists and retailers.
“We have center-pivot irrigation on almost every acre, but we must be good stewards because the Northwest is in a major drought,” he says. “We’re trying not to over irrigate, but we can’t afford to under-irrigate either. We’ve used the platform to try to find inconsistencies in our watering patterns.”
With center-pivot irrigation, a partially plugged or incorrectly sized nozzle is detrimental, but those issues are hard to recognize from the ground before crop damage occurs. Using satellite imagery, Nielson takes a daily look at how fields respond to irrigation and the toll taken by abiotic stressors. If the imagery starts showing stress in a circular pattern, for example, he knows to look closely at the irrigation system to find the source of the stress.
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