Drones have become a widely used technology system in the agricultural industry over the past few years, with applications including irrigation, pollination, security, spray application and health monitoring.
For Westlock, with some of the highest crop yields in Alberta and over 3.5 million acres of land used for productive farming, applying innovative technologies like drones might not be at the top of farmers' minds.
According to Roosevelt Quiah from Pixal 3D, about $20 billion goes into agriculture annually. “That’s your fertilizer, your pesticides, your herbicides and all of that stuff. So they typically just tend to apply it broadly over their fields. So the opportunity here is for precision agriculture.”
Farmers typically use ‘traditional scouting’ methods to look for areas that need attention. This involves sending out scouts that go into the field and inspect some of it, but not all.
“If you’re looking at your typical thousand-acre farm in Alberta, it’s pretty time-consuming to inspect every plant. So what they [farmers] do is they end up scouting the field, and they often miss various diseases or other ailments in their fields,” says Quiah. This form of scouting often leads to monetary loss.
For 1,200 acres, a typical farmer would spend around $296,000 on farming inputs like fertilizer and pesticides. With the help of drones, Quiah has estimated they have saved farmers 20 per cent, or $59,000 a year, by reducing the amount of inputs for their fields without sacrificing their yields.
The technology Quiah and his team work with is an artificial intelligence (AI) based model that uses images of crops within various elements to detect the deficiencies, “It’s just a big data process, a lot of gathering data and feeding into a machine learning model and through that, that’s how we’re able to create this algorithm.”
Pixal 3D works with several farming partners like the Gateway Research Organization (GRO) in Westlock to evolve their work. Their partners allow them access to fly and collect more data for their algorithm, resulting in more accurate data collection.
Currently, they can determine their model has an 85 per cent accuracy when it comes to determining the health of the crops. However, where they are looking to develop over the next few years is being able to determine the exact cause of the anomalies. “The prescriptions are different. So if we have that level of precision, we’re able to get straight from the data to the prescription quicker.”
The drones work on the field using multi-spectral bands that analyze the specific ranges of electromagnetic wavelengths such as near-infrared, thermal infrared and visible to create detailed information from the image. The images of plants are broken down into these bands, which allows them to see what could be affecting the growth or yield of the plant.
Benefits
The agriculture and farming industry is one of the largest in Alberta, but over the past few years, revenue has decreased, according to Statistics Canada. In 2024, the province saw a 1.7 per cent increase in operating expenses totalling approximately $18 billion while the gross revenue was just over $23 billion, a 0.9 per cent decrease.
Maximizing cost while minimizing amount spent is what most farmers strive to do, and with drone technology testing the boundaries of data collection, this is becoming a higher possibility. By being able to find what areas require more fertilizer, what areas need more nitrogen or which ones are diseased, they are able to save costs for farmers by reducing the amount spent on these materials. Around 90 per cent of farmers already use GPS-guided equipment to determine where to put more of some and less of others.
There is also the yield side. “It’s easy to determine that this crop was sick and this was saved, but where we’re able to determine the yield benefit is mostly where we do our seeding interventions,” said Quiah. He used the example of being able to tell a farmer that seeds are needed more in one area than another. He estimates farmers see a four per cent yield gain when using drones.
Process
For farmers looking to get a drone on-site to analyze their farm, Quiah gets someone to the farm within 48 hours after being contacted to book a pilot test and fly their field. Results will be recorded, analyzed and delivered two days later.
At first, they create a boundary over the farm to fly the drone over, mapping the farm to mark obstacles like power lines and off-limits zones. The drone will then be recalled once the boundaries are mapped and calibrated for the specific zone.
The drone goes out again to start an imaging mission where every square inch of the farm is mapped out. The results are a full aerial view with an overlay of all the areas in the field that have issues.
Pixal 3D will also assist with inputting the information into the John Deere Operations Centre. “So now if you’re a farmer, you could call us on Monday and on Friday, you could have that data in your combine, and you know exactly which parts of your farm to spray.”
When it comes to bringing new technology into the old farmers' ways, some will say that they won’t take it, relying on how they’ve always done it, compared to the possibility that it fails. Quiah has faith, though, “At the end of the day, I say if a farmer truly believes that they’re going to make the best business decision because they’re business people, right? So if they truly see the value in being able to save input cost, increase yield, it’s going to be a no-brainer for them.”
