Agriculture's game of drones

How the land looks from a drone's-eye view.

In the wildly popular TV series Game of Thrones, the spy-masters rely on "little birds" to keep them informed of comings and goings.

New Zealand farmers may soon find themselves in the same position, thanks to a new technology that's taking off: drones

Drones - also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVS) are small, light, and incredibly manoeuvrable remote-controlled or autonomous aircraft, usually equipped with cameras. Several New Zealand companies, including Raglan-based Aeronavics, Palmerston North-based Hawkeye UAV, and Skycam UAV NZ are playing the game of drones. Not that they're toys - the machines are being hawked for a number of industries, including agriculture, which is a growing market.

Southland farmer Neil Gardyne says drones are nothing short of "an agricultural game changer".

Neil and his partner Philippa run three farms, with sheep, beef, and cereal cropping. They use drones for dozens of tasks, including monitoring stock and finding cast sheep. Since investing in the drones, Neil says they've halved the number of cast sheep deaths. They're also used for weed control, and looking at water infrastructure -- "we can find a leaky trough with the drone and then decide if we need to go out on the farm bike and fix it. Instead of taking two trips we're just taking one."

"Drones give you opportunity to easily monitor activity on your farm -- where your stock are, waterways, stock health. It's a birds-eye view," says Aeronavics co-founder Rob Brower, a former commercial pilot and lifelong aviation enthusiast. "The video feed streams wirelessly back to a base station unit, with you sitting on your porch, or parked in your truck. The drones can be put on automated flight paths as well as manually controlled. You pull up a Google Earth overlay on a laptop, run the mission planning software with a few touches on a touchscreen -- run down this paddock, across to this trough, check this gully -- and literally just sit back and watch the screen.

There are more than 400 existing "apps" for the drones already, but the Gardynes say they're developing new ones for their drones, which will enable them to autonomously count sheep and measure pasture growth several times a week. "The drone cost around $10,000, but I reckon it's worth 50 grand to the farm," Neil says. "We do 11000km a year on our four-wheelers, at $4 a kilometre, factoring in petrol, depreciation, labour. We realised that about 80 per cent of that is just checking stuff, going from A to B. With the drones, just over the last year, we've reduced our total commuting time by 2000 fewer kilometres, so there's a saving of $8000."

There are dozens of uses for drones for all kinds of farmers -- from dairy farmers and pastoralists to horticulturalists. Drones don't just carry cameras; they can be equipped with a variety of sensors that provide information such as pasture rate growth, ground moisture, and even nutrient levels. Special mapping sensors can give a full 3D survey of a given area, mapping it in comprehensive detail.

"For orchardists, they can give you an indication of how healthy your crops are, whether they're ready to harvest, likely yields, and even help with disease control," Rob says.

Drones are already at work with Scion, the Crown forestry research institute, with pest spraying, 3D scanning, and using laser sensors to determine the volume of timber in a forest.

With drone technology taking off all over the world, they're set to become a common sight on New Zealand farms. "One of our customers reckons he's not getting any new header dogs in. It used to be seeing a farmer with a drone on the back of his motorbike was an odd sight, but we're going to get used to it," Rob says.