Burdened with a cool spring, farmers in Eastern Canada received much-needed help in instantly diagnosing and correcting stand establishment challenges this year thanks to the arrival of the world’s largest agricultural drone fleet and Corteva Flight™.
Corteva Flight is proprietary recognition software that, when combined with advanced mapping technology from DroneDeploy, allows growers to quickly and accurately assess stand counts from the air. In less than 15 minutes, the drones can survey a 160-acre field to identify variations in plant soil and health, giving farmers direct access to real-time aerial views and data, helping them make more informed agronomic decisions, better assess disease or pest concerns and optimally place products.
“What makes Corteva Flight such an incredibly powerful tool is its ability to overcome sample biases of stand assessment in the past,” explains Dave Harwood, Technical Services Manager for Corteva Agriscience. “A tenth of an acre sampled more frequently and across a wider area provides more accuracy and efficiency that’s far less subject to error.”
Corteva Agriscience™ has now deployed more than 400 drones from DJI, the world leader in commercial and civilian drones, across its global teams. Harwood says the nine drones deployed in Eastern Canada this spring paid instant dividends for farmers.
“With Canada being on the northern edge of corn and soybean production in North America, the cooler weather often leads to more establishment challenges,” says Harwood. “This spring, our agronomists were able to use the drones to quickly and accurately assess corn and soybean establishment for our customers so they could make timely decisions on whether they needed additional planting.”
Get the Facts on Corteva Flight™
- Corteva Agriscience is the industry leader in agriculture UAV technology and the operator of the world’s largest agricultural drone fleet with more than 400 drones deployed across the company’s global teams.
- Corteva’s drones were developed by DJI, the world leader in commercial and civilian drones with more than 70 per cent of the drone market. Corteva agronomists have been trained on how best to harness the power of the aerial technology and have been certified according to local aviation regulations.
- The drones combine Corteva Flight’s proprietary field intelligence technology, which quickly and accurately assesses stand counts from the air, with Live Map technology from DroneDeploy, the leading cloud software program for commercial drones.
- Thanks to Corteva Flight and Drone Deploy, Pioneer’s agronomy team can provide farmers in Eastern Canada with real-time, sharable drone maps and 3D models of their operation. Corteva hopes to expand the initiative to Western Canada in the near future.
- Corteva is aggressively evaluating and implementing decision agronomy tools like Corteva Flight to enable agronomists and contract seed growers to make timely decisions impacting seed yields and quality. This drone investment, coupled with other digital offerings provided by Granular Ag and Corteva Fields, shows the company’s continued commitment to providing Canadian growers with the data they need to make timely, informed agronomic decisions.
- Corteva’s use of aerial imagery and drone-based software with customers is an extension of the techniques being used by our research and development teams to measure various crop performance attributes. To name a few examples, researchers are now measuring plant density, relative maturity and plant health from the air.
Source : Corteva Agriscience