# Surging Drones and Big Brother



## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

A soon to be Pandora's Box.

Regards, Mike

http://www.agweb.com/article/agriculture-drone-market-set-to-surge-746-naa-ben-potter/


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## Tim/South (Dec 12, 2011)

All my hay making is transparent. They can see it from the road.

There is less and less Ag in our area. Folks are learning not to get overly involved in a farmers business. They may find themselves driving to the next county to get a roll of hay.

I am coming to the conclusion that anything grown in soil is organic. At least on my acres.


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## NewBerlinBaler (May 30, 2011)

Pennsylvania just banned drones on all state forest and state game lands - about 4 million acres.

Gary


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## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

NewBerlinBaler said:


> Pennsylvania just banned drones on all state forest and state game lands - about 4 million acres.
> 
> Gary


Probably to protect wildlife from poachers....or unscrupulous individuals.

Regards, Mike


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

The gubmint is WAY behind the curve on this whole drone thing... I've read a lot about it and I'm convinced that drones in farming are "the coming thing".

Who would have thought 20-25 years ago that GPS autosteer, yield mapping, grid mapping and variable inputs, on-the-go population changing planters (or multi-hybrid planters switching between hybrids in a field by computer, variable rate technology, etc. would be where it is today?

With improving technology in sensors and technology and the know-how to use it and integrate it into a systems approach, and with costs of high tech generally coming down over time, drones are set to be the next big evolution in agriculture. We've had the data age, now we'll have the digital age in farming. Photos and crop scouting are just the tip of the iceberg. It's possible NOW to have drones that go out and do jobs in the field, doing remote sensing or doing pre-programmed jobs like spraying selected areas or such things. Imagine in a few years when the technology matures and we can couple remote sensing and detection with application hardware and use "smart programming" to make the decisions in-situ... IOW, sending a drone (or fleet of drones) out to fly over a field, image it, look for particular weeds, and then hover down and make a pin-point application of herbicide to wipe out that particular weed or weedy spot. Instead of having to make spot applications with large field sprayers or such, covering big acres trying to "hit all the bad spots" and doing damage to the crop turning and driving large sprayers or equipment through it, sometimes in excessively wet conditions, etc, you send out a drone that never touches the ground to do a PINPOINT job with a tiny fraction of the material required. "Drones" aren't limited to the flying type, either. Tracked or wheeled self-steering GPS controlled drones have been experimented with, and show great promise. How about sending out a small fleet of tracked or wheeled ground-level drones with various slide-in modules containing fertilizers or pesticides or whatever, and having them scour a field and take measurements and apply those materials as needed to the particular spots in the field where they're needed... Such drones can monitor their active ingredient supplies and can be programmed to automatically return to the mother supply vehicle to refuel, recharge batteries, get more active ingredient of whatever they're applying, etc. They can download data back to a central control computer and send updates on their status and progress,and call for help if they get stuck or have some problem.

The gubmint is SO stuck in last-century thinking that about all they can do is have overly-excited kneejerk over-reactions to things and throw up roadblocks and be a general hindrance.

It's like SpaceX and NASA. While SpaceX is landing their first stages of their Falcon rockets on barges at sea (successfully for the first time just day before yesterday matter of fact) and back on land (as they did a few months ago) autonomously by having them fly back to a landing site, deploy landing legs, and throttle one rocket engine so they can touch down vertically in a controlled hover to landing... and they've done that for a FRACTION of the time and effort that NASA has WASTED in the last 12 years taking old shuttle parts and having to massively redesign them to build some super-expensive mega-rocket that won't even fly for another couple years or so, and will cost BILLIONS of dollars more to develop and operate, and which will be TOTALLY EXPENDABLE vehicles with all those shuttle parts that were DESIGNED to be reused (and thus very expensive) will be thrown away to sink to the bottom of the ocean with every flight. Basically, it's "back to the 60's" for NASA in the most expensive way possible!

But, gubmint is like that... it's the difference between a progressive entrepreneurial company with a vision, and a gubmint bureaucracy looking to justify and spend a huge gubmint budget no matter how stupid it might be, and justify its own existence in the process, regardless of progress or results.

Later! OL J R


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