STiR coffee and tea magazine

42 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 2, 2019 (April / May) D By Peter Keen rones are becoming as core to tea farming as smart phones. That's about a bold and debatable a statement prediction as saying that climate change is causing problems. The two certainties are interrelated. Drones are a powerful tool in the sustainable development to increase global food supply by 70% in the next decade to meet population growth. Technically, a drone is a type of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle): Yes, and an Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, or Huawei Mate is just a mobile version of a landline tele- phone. Drones are a combination of smartphone apps, flying tractor, field manager, and worker, air taxi, and photography studio with X-ray cameras. None of this is gee-whiz or technobabble. It's here now. Obviously, operational, financial, political, and regulatory factors can slow or accelerate diffusion and adoption, but that's the same for smart- phones, too. The infrastructures for embedding drones in agriculture are largely in place. The main components of drones that open up high value opportunities for tea farmers and even sellers and servers are: Flying device: Fixed wing drones are mini-planes and can carry loads of up to 80 pounds – of chemical sprays, water, seeds, packages, fertilizer, sensors, and cameras. Coptors are generally smaller and take off and land vertically. They are the ones best suited for small tea farms, whereas fixed wing drones are the tool of Brazil's huge coffee estates, Japanese rice fields, and Australian livestock framing. A good quality basic coptor costs as little as $1,500, but most are in the $8-15,000 range. They have more variations in features that cars: options for dust protection, ruggedness, and flight range (typically 5-40 minutes), for instance. Cameras: These range from high-resolution multi-pixel visual image equipment for $200 or so, through to near-infrared ones ($500-5,000). Hyperspectral cameras that can take visual images on the same flight as those from invisible light up to NDVI (normalized difference vegetative index) international standard measurements of the amount, type and health of vegetation in a scan. ($6,000 and up. And up.) These multispectral kits have access to plenty of software to process the drone data. The options range from standalone laptop to network connection via an Internet wireless "cloud' service to one of the many commercial and collaborative development agencies that interpret images and send back maps, alerts, and "prescription mapping", recommendations, right down to "Spray here, here and here between 5 and 7 pm – oh, frost alert for Thursday." Drones Become Aerial Workhorses of Tea Camera drones priced $1000-$5000

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