Our Contributors 

5 Great Drone Applications, April 19th 2015

Drone Applications JESHOOTS / Pixabay Our friends at Flyver regularly share drone applications that they have come across and find interesting.  Here is a great installment. 1.  Cow Art If we still had the creative category, this would have fit right in there. Surprisingly, or rather unsurprisingly, no one up to this point has used cows to draw images that are visible from the air. Until now. Derek Klingenberg uses a truck full of feed , a large herd of cows and a drone to make what he calls #CowArt. The way…

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Our Interviews 

DroneDeploy Announces Partnership with DJI

DroneDeploy We are very excited to see more drone-related announcements coming out today and this one comes from DroneDeploy once again.   DroneDeploy announces partnership with DJI with software for aerial mapping, imaging, and additional drone automation which is available via an App with DJI Phantom Vision 2 Drones.  This is a big win for both companies and consumers. We reached out to Mike Winn, founder and CEO of DroneDeploy, to ask him a few more questions. Q. Congratulations on the new product! This sounds like a major step forward, how…

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Drones In The News 

Fighting the Russian wheat aphid with drones

Stories like this one are important to understand.  Wheat farmers in America have been battling the Russian wheat aphid for more than 30 years and now Australia is preparing to do the same.  The challenge with this small creature is that it can be very hard to track down and, once you do track it down, you may be too late. Gartenredakteur / Pixabay Drones are providing a solution for rapidly scanning and analyzing fields for the aphid and will be an important tool in winning the battle.  Read this…

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Our Contributors 

21 Section 333 Exemptions Approved, 3/20/2015 – 3/27/2015

21 Section 333 Exemptions Approved The FAA made a lot of progress on exemptions during the last few days with 21 section 333 exemptions approved. Here are the section 333 exemptions approved by the FAA and a summary of planned use for each. San Diego Gas & Electric Company The exemption notes: “The exemption would allow the petitioner to operate an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to conduct aerial inspections of its electric and gas facilities including emergency response damage assessments” Southern Company Services, Inc. The exemption notes: “The exemption would…

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Drones In The News 

The Ledger.com: Unmanned Aircraft a Promising Agriculture Technology

Farming becomes easier and easier with new agriculture technology such as drones This piece on the use of drones as a key agriculture technology was originally published on TheLedger.com. Ty Rozier of Elevated Horizons demonstrates an Agri-6 UAV during a UAV Applications in Agriculture workshop at the UF/IFAS Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred on Friday. SCOTT WHEELER | THE LEDGER “LAKE ALFRED | You might see drones buzzing over Florida farms in 2017. Ty Rozier of Elevated Horizons demonstrates an Agri-6 UAV during a UAV Applications in Agriculture…

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Drones In The News 

Precision Agriculture: Farmers see drones in their future

Precision agriculture will play a key role in feeding future generations. This article, originally published in The Gazette, shows awareness of precision agriculture growing in the mainstream. DUBUQUE — Unmanned aerial vehicles, famous for delivering lethal strikes on terrorists, have yet to live up to their considerable promise for improving farm productivity. An unmanned aerial vehicle at Crop Tech Services Inc. in Ely use drones such as this one to monitor clients’ farm fields. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette) “They have the potential to gather and process an unprecedented amount of data, but that…

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Our Interviews 

Slantrange focuses on making farming more productive

Q. What is SlantRange’s business focused on? We design, manufacture, and market sensor and analytics systems for use on 3rd party drone aircraft that measure a variety of crop health conditions for farmers. We are continually seeking out ways to use airborne remote sensing technologies to improve farming productivity. Q. Your technology adds tremendous value to many areas, lets talk agriculture. How does SlantRange help farmers? Our system produces multiple data products for farmers that each have some unique value: Crop Populations – Measurements of the plant density (plants/acre) that…

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SLANTRANGE Wins Innovative World Technologies Category at 2015 SXSW Accelerator Competition

“Over the past six years, more than 50 percent of the SXSW Accelerator participants have gone on to receive funding in excess of $1.7 billion and 12 percent of the companies have been acquired,” said SXSW Accelerator Event Producer, Chris Valentine. “The 2015 Accelerator winners are truly ones to watch and we expect them to achieve similar success.” San Diego, CA (PRWEB) March 18, 2015 SLANTRANGE, Inc., a drone-based agricultural crop sensor and data analytics company, was awarded first place in the Innovative World Technologies category at the 7th Annual SXSW…

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Drones In The News 

Mississippi State University Utilizes Drones

Originally published on AGWired. Robert Moorehead of Mississippi State University “Robert Moorehead, Director of Geosystems Research Institute and Northern Gulf Institutes at Mississippi State University, was at the 2015Mid-South Farm & Gin Show to showcase the research being done on harnessing UAV technology on farm.. Moorehead had a chance to chat with Chuck Zimmerman about their use of UAVs and drones. Geosystems Research focuses on agriculture; they utilize UAV technology to determine plant development, particularly in early-plant corn. Using one of the drones that they had on display, they “can view down to…

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Our Contributors 

Crop Mapping with UAVs

Precision Agriculture, Crop Mapping, and more Misconceptions Abound In the past few weeks I have had more than one conversation with people wanting to use small electric rotary wing systems (quads, hexacopters etc) for crop mapping. In more than one instance people have become upset with me when I inform them that these airframes with their relatively low endurance are not suited for mapping ten thousand hectares of sugarcane in central Guatemala. Depending on weather conditions, payload, battery, airframe etc you can only reasonably expect 15 minutes of flight time…

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