Our team went on a super-exciting mission to look into the benefits of drone technology for rapeseed and canola farmers. We came back with numbers that surprised everyone. Buckle up!

Have you ever wondered how to improve canola yield and how to increase crop productivity without harming the environment and — even more importantly — without breaking your budget? Then it’s about time to take a closer look at how drone technology is helping farmers all around the globe achieve better results.

To some of you, using drones to increase crop productivity may sound a bit surprising. Really, drones? I’m looking for ways to get better canola yield, not impress NASA!

Well, drone usage in agriculture is far away from being a sci-fi thing that might happen in the distant future — it’s happening at this very moment. And the reason why drone usage in agriculture is becoming more and more popular is fairly simple: it works.

While there have been various constraints in the near past, drone technology has managed to become both affordable and applicable thanks to the amazing technological advancements. And the continuously rising numbers of users and performed imagery analyses proves that drone technology is more than a temporary trend — it’s here to stay and make farmers’ lives easier in the long run.

Drone Intelligence for Rapeseed and Canola Farmers

Based on the Agremo Plant Insights’ user statistics, wheat and corn farmers were among the first to embrace remote sensing in precision farming. And it seems that their achievements encouraged others to give drone technology a shot as well: “So far, Agremo successfully provided insights for more than 50 crop types. And thanks to our avid users, this figure continues to rise”, says Milan, the CEO of Agremo.

A short while ago, Agremo’s agricultural experts determined that there is another crop that could benefit a lot from drone technology: rapeseed and canola. And with flowering season just around the corner, it seemed like the perfect time to think about how to track this crop’s performance and elevate its overall efficiency with help from above — with drone technology.

To find out how drones can help rapeseed and canola farmers, the guys and gals from Agremo went the extra mile — or, to be more precise, they flew the extra mile.

Canola Field Mapping — Not All That Glitters Is Gold

Seasoned farmers know that planting rapeseed or canola — a specific type of rapeseed with a lower level of erucic acid — is a both time and resource consuming process. What’s more, the individual growth stages of rapeseed and canola have very specific and rather inflexible requirements, and missing out on important crop behaviors can result in both financial and harvest loss. Another challenging point that farmers are facing is that the canola growth cycle lasts almost an entire year, making the cultivation of rapeseed and canola a year-round commitment.

What seems to be evident is that only attentive farmers can be successful farmers when it comes to canola and rapeseed. Only by monitoring and analyzing crops on a regular basis and in an efficient manner, you’ll be able to draw a positive balance.

The problem? Constant monitoring is a lot of work, and — what’s even worse — it’s a lot of guesswork, far from accurate and reliable insights.

Drone Technology for Rapeseed and Canola Farmers Who Want Results Based on Facts Rather than Guesswork

Drone technology is able to solve these kinds of headaches, which is exactly why savvy industry leaders have already started implementing drone solutions.

One of them is Canada’s Canola Council: in their annual report for 2016, they report on employing aerial imagery collected by drones for canola performance trials.

But drone technology isn’t just for the big players. Small- and mid-scale canola farmers can obtain powerful insights just as well — all it takes are pictures made by a local dronepreneur and a few clicks to run these pictures through a powerful data processing software.

Assessing flowering levels in rapeseed and canola by using drone technology in two different ways:

• Optimize pest control measures;
• Determine the best time for harvesting and swathing.

Assessing Flowering Levels of Rapeseed and Canola for Pest Control

Our team of agricultural experts looked at the specific features and conditions of rapeseed and canola and went through the different growth stages to determine when and how drone technology can help rapeseed and canola growers do better.

Their analysis and the following field test of the Agremo mapping team confirmed: making regular aerial footage during the flowering stage of rapeseed and canola and performing a suitable report using a professional agricultural data processing solution (such as the Agremo flowering estimator) can help optimize rapeseed and canola performances significantly.

Why Shooting Aerial Footage of Your Canola Field during Flowering Stage Is a Good Idea

How so?

Determining the growth stage of canola and rapeseed is needed in order to make important management decisions in terms of pest control measures for example. By knowing the flowering stage of your crop, you’ll know the optimum time to apply pesticide and fungicide.

This is usually easier said than done: the entire flowering stage lasts about 14 to 21 days, and there are very narrow timeframes if you want your pest control measures to work.

Sclerotinia — a Frequent Headache of Rapeseed and Canola Farmers

Take Sclerotinia for example. According to Bruce Barker, an author from Top Crop Manager, who collected important insights of assessing bloom stage in canola, targeting 20 to 30% flowering for fungicide application shows the best results. Applying fungicide earlier or later than this will either lead Sclerotinia outbreaks or to early petal drop. Or in plain English: severe loss for the farmer.

Bayer Crop Science confirmed this in their newest guidelines on Proline, a fungicide used for Sclerotinia control. According to them, the optimum timing for applying this type of fungicide is between 20 and 30% bloom as well.

20 to 30% flowering is equivalent to about 15 open flowers on the main stem. Up until now, this stage has been determined by walking across the field and counting open flowers on as many plants as possible.

Such an approach is not only inaccurate; it’s also exhausting and difficult to uphold if you have more than a few acres. Scouting only 30% of a 250 acre field means walking almost 4 miles — a distance that makes constant monitoring almost impossible, and even if you make this effort, you still cover only a small part of the field.

In a recent interview for Farmer’s Weekly, Johannes Joubert, who won the Protein Research Foundation’s Southern Cape Canola yield competition in 2015 confirmed that pest and disease control is all about preventive and proactive thinking. If a plant is already infected, it’s too late to spray for Sclerotinia.

In such a case, decisions in pest and weed control are a matter of days — and being too late or too early can lead to very different yield results.

As opposed to traditional methods, pictures obtained by drone technology are able to provide actionable and all-round solutions. With drone technology, you can:

• Obtain precise information about your field (with an accuracy of less than an inch);
• Capture high-resolution images of up to 150 acres per hour;
• Enable regular and frequent crop monitoring.

This means: no legwork, no guesswork, and no more spending money on inefficient pest control measures.

Assessing Flowering Levels of Rapeseed and Canola for Determining the Proper Time of Swathing and Harvesting

According to the swathing guidelines published by the Canola Council of Canada, the best time to swath for optimum seed quality and yield is when seed color change is at about 30 to 40%. It’s recommended to start inspecting the field about one week after flowering ended, as the proper time to swath is about three to four weeks after the end of the flowering stage.

However, determining this particular stage can be difficult, as the time frames are also quite narrow: hot and dry weather conditions, for example, can cause seed color to change rapidly.

Turning Drone-collected Pictures into Information — How it Works

We went on a field trip to find out how this process might look for the average farmer. The mapping was conducted by one of our professional drone operators and our mapping team. The mapping itself was completed within minutes; the following analysis was uploaded onto the DroneDeploy platform while still on the field.

We then chose the Agremo Flowering Estimator from the drop-down menu and clicked enter. That was it — the rest is now up to the Agremo analysts.

The rapeseed field was about 3.5 acres big and a walk through the field lead us to believe that the crop was at its very best:

By the end of the day, the results were ready: the flowering estimator report revealed that only 68.75% of the field’s crop had reached full flowering levels. What was visible to the naked eye, and what looked rich and ample, was in fact far from peak levels, which the final overview of the flowering report confirms:

Armed with this kind of information, farmers can find out exactly what is happening on their field. And with this kind of technology, this becomes a matter of minutes, not days.