Nurseries are beginning to purchase small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS), or drones, to accomplish several tasks including sales and marketing, crop inventory, and crop monitoring. Nursery operators are faced with a number of business decisions before adopting this emerging technology. To generate useful images, a nursery would need to purchase an appropriate aircraft, sensor, computer, and image processing software.
Like any other business decision, the nursery needs to evaluate what option makes the most sense based on the cost outlay of each option and the type and frequency of needs that the business has. For example, Nursery A only needs a high-quality video/images of their overall operation which can be used on the company webpage and for use at trade shows. Nursery B wants to use the sUAS for weekly crop monitoring. Nursery A may find that it is more cost effective to pay a third party provider that specializes in flying the sUAS and has the hardware and software to generate the video product. However, Nursery B may determine that it is more cost effective to purchase the aircraft, sensor, and software so they have the capability in-house and can easily fly on-demand.
Aircraft
There are two broad categories of sUAS, rotary
Sensor
Understanding that payload weight is critical when flying sUAS, sensor manufacturers have responded by quickly miniaturizing sensors. There are seven categories of sensors (Table 1). A major reason nurseries will limit themselves to certain sensors will be cost. An alternative to owning your own sensor is to hire an outside service for more expensive operations.
Nurseries are most likely to own an RGB camera,
Software
The final piece in your aerial imaging system would be software. Some examples of software that you may use for processing aerial images include open-source or free software such as QGIS, Microsoft ICE, ImageJ, MeshLab and commercial software such as Agisoft Photoscan and Pix4D. Remember, instead of owning the software yourself, another option is to pay a third party provider to process your images. Examples of data processing services include DroneDeploy, Airinov, and Agremo (formerly AgriSens).
It is likely that a nursery would want to ‘stitch’ multiple aerial images together into a single composite image. To give you an example of what is involved we recently collected some images at Willoway Nurseries (see photos on this page) and processed them using the free software from Microsoft called ICE (Image Composite Editor).
It is likely that within five years almost every nursery will own a sUAS for even simple tasks such as infrastructure inspection or sales and marketing. Like any capital investment, nurseries need to crunch some numbers to evaluate how deep to extend into this emerging technology themselves or whether it makes better financial sense to hire a third-party provider for specific services.
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