STiR coffee and tea magazine

44 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 2, 2019 (April / May) Here are just a few examples of proven pay- offs that are tea-specific or tea-inevitable. The lat- ter include the many pilots, programs in the design stage and scattered individual implementations: Infra-red plant diagnostics: signs of plant stress are apparent through sensors ten days before the physical damage is visible. Drones carry multispectral cameras that can move just a few feet above plants Mapping and profiling: Data is at the very core of precision agriculture and improve extend by an incalculable degree the costs, ease and variety of capture and also usage. Each sin- gle plant has its own growth and health charac- teristics, each meter of land its own conditions, and each day its subtle and volatile weather shifts. There's always been too much data for a farmer to process, though they develop their own skills of spotting and interpreting. They still have too little data to cover all contingen- cies and act quickly. Drones change all this, supported by geo- spatial data analytic software and ability to communicate with experts remotely. They also augment or reduce the need for workers in the field, responsible for walkabout scouting, in- spection and surveillance. Drones have been neatly described as "high flying babysitters" for the fields. Imaging and mapping: drones halve the costs of satellite imaging for farms smaller than twenty hectares and increase frequency of updates from around two days to whenever you want. They are unaffected by clouds. Spraying and fertilization: water savings in irrigation of up to 90%, chemicals reduced 30-50% and fertilizer use by up to 70%. Labor savings factor of 10 and up, 5 times faster than tractor application of pesticides. This is the "precision" in smart farming: delivering the exact amount at the exact location at the ex- act time instead of spreading it across an entire area. Over time, this should also greatly reduce the often appallingly high level of health haz- ards, many life-shortening, of workers that are the direct result of imprecise spraying. Harvest yield: field mapping and farm profiling aid in such key areas as precision in fertilizer and water use. One of the most suc- cessful region wide deployment of Big Data tools via drone data collection reports a dou- bling of yield and a 70% increase in smallhold- er incomes. Planting: decrease in costs of 85%. The drones punch holes and shoot seeds and seed- lings plus doses of nutrients in them for re- forestation of trees that tea fields need in their environment to ensure biodiversity and shade. The latest drones can plant 40,000 trees a day. The examples can be multiplied. It's a little like listing smartphone apps. It will take many years for them to be fully deployed. Public sector de- velopment agencies, specialty service providers, farming experts and government programs set the pace and provide much of the funding. There are many complexities involved in organizing, cat- egorizing and standardizing data. Education and building trust among the traditionalist and natural risk-averse smallholder tea growing communities are a vital enabler. Expertise in tea farming has to be added to technology services. Internet connec- tivity is essential. With all these caveats, the take up rate of drones is accelerating in agriculture. It tends to be fastest in high value crops; drones are near com- monplace in Chinese fruit orchards where there is strong Provincial government support. Brazil is a major innovator in both drone manufacturing, software and use. Assam is a hive of planning, but key issues of funding are not resolved. Africa's tea growing nations, especially Uganda and Malawi, are very active. And eBay lists well over a hundred agriculture drones for sale, from $1,200 to $7,500. In the old cliché, the future is now. Mapping and profiling drone (NDVI Imaging) Ex-NASA engineer intends to plant one billion trees a year using drones to place seed pod, spray nutrients and fertilizer at a rate of 40,000 per day

• Cover