Drones ready for take-off

You could call him a futurist.

But don’t get the impression he dreams of watching over “Gilroy Farms” north of Moree from his lounge room as computer programmed workers plant, grow and harvest his crops.

No, Mr Boughton has his feet well and truly placed in the paddock.

The 27-year-old, who runs the family farm with wife Olivia and parents Randall and Donna, was conditioned by his parents to balance on the cutting edge of the industry.

Randall and Donna were early adopters of Real Time Kinematic systems in their machinery to allow inter-row sowing, as well as being some of the first to start no-till farming.

So when Mr Boughton went to the University of Queensland at Gatton to study agricultural science, from which he graduated in 2008, he worked for a progressive precision agriculture consultancy firm, which along with his interest in computers and his upbringing, cemented his quest for a more informed way of farming.

The 2014 Nuffield scholar, sponsored by Grains Research and Development Australia, is about to embark on a journey exploring the possibilities of unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles in the grains industry, where he believes there is huge value in accessing precise data for better paddock management.

At present, collecting this data is expensive and time consuming.

“This data could be used in applications such as weed and disease monitoring, water movement and vegetation mapping, facilitating variable rate fertiliser application and yield forecasting,” Mr Boughton said.

Mr Boughton has dipped his toe into the potential of unmanned ground vehicles, which could carry out operations, such as spraying with the use of a camera, and has built a prototype as a “proof of concept”.

But the lure of the aerial alternative is what’s capturing Mr Boughton’s attention at present.

Aerial images and, more importantly, infrared data that can help you see variability in paddocks regular visual bands can’t see can be invaluable in helping farmers make decisions about managing their crops.

“You can see the crop growth,” Mr Boughton said.

“Once we understand what causes the variability in our paddocks we can make changes that suit the crop.”

For example, if a crop is growing and the farmer wants to apply fertiliser, knowing the health of the crop throughout the paddock allows the farmer to know the best fertiliser rates to apply, Mr Boughton said.

Traditionally, farms seeking to map inter-paddock variability have relied on satellite imagery, yield data from the harvester or paying for images from a light plane.

Each option also had pitfalls.

Satellite imagery with infrared data can be acquired from the US government at no cost.

However the resolution can be poor, cloud cover can be a problem and timing can be difficult as the satellites may not be over the area the grower needs at the necessary time.

High resolution satellite imagery from private enterprise is available but still suffers a lower resolution and can vary in cost.

Effectively, acquiring aerial images was a luxury more than an essential tool in managing the crops.

Previously experts in this technology focused on mining and surveying, but Mr Boughton said now there were companies inventing for the agriculture industry, especially in the US and South America.

Because of the geographical size of cropping operations, Mr Boughton was more interested in fixed wing models, rather than multi-rotor models.

In most models, the paddock boundaries are programmed into a computer then that data is sent to the plane, which uses an autopilot.

Some are fitted with Go-Pros but most have a down-facing camera with near-infrared capacity.

Essentially they use a lot of the components from a remote control plane but how much a producer wants to spend on one depends on how much they want to do.

“There are three levels you can enter into,” Mr Boughton said.

“There’s the ‘do-it-yourself’ level where you buy all the components and put it together for about $1000.

“You can pay somebody else to buy the components and put it together for $2000 to $3000.

“Then a level three unmanned aerial vehicle is a commercially developed system, fully integrated and does everything for you. This can cost anything from $10,000 to $50,000.”

Even though Mr Boughton has just started his scholarship, he has already done a DIY project at home, flying one fixed wing device over the property.

As part of Mr Boughton’s research, he will be breaking down the different components that go into an agricultural unmanned aerial vehicle, which include the platform (fixed wing or multi rotor), the GPS (global positioning system), the autopilot, (which controls the plane the sensor or camera on the plane (probably most important, which needs to be light enough to be carried but work well enough to collect the data) how to implement that into agriculture systems and finally the legal and operational side of it.

Mr Boughton leaves on his first trip next month.

Click here to follow his journey.