Grasshoppers...The Beef of The Future? Not If Drones Have Anything To Say About It!

Written by Andre Louis-Ferdinand

One of the macro problems facing humanity in the 21st century is a looming global food shortage and the resulting political destabilization. This is do largely to changing climate, but mostly to dramatically increasing population. Global population is now 7 billion and will be 10 billion by 2050! Regardless on how fast we respond to our changing climate or growing population, a global food shortage is almost surely to happen and is less than 40 years away. However, don't worry. The U.N. has devised an ingenious solution to this catastrophic problem...eat insects. According to the the U.N. "raising and harvesting insects requires much less land than raising cows, pigs, and sheep. Insects convert food into protein much more efficiently than livestock do—meaning they need less food to produce more product." I don't know about you, but this is NOT an option for me...

"Necessity is the mother of invention." Just as we begin to see global food prices rising, enters the unmanned farm hand. Dr. Fred Davies senior science adviser and Professor of Horticultural Sciences said that "The U.S. agricultural productivity has averaged less than 1.2 percent per year between 1990 and 2007. More efficient technologies...will need to be developed -- and equally important, better ways for applying these technologies locally for farmers -- to address this challenge." Unmanned aircraft with advanced sensors and imaging capabilities are giving farmers new ways to increase yields and reduce crop damage.

These aircraft are equipped with an autopilot using GPS that do all the flying, from auto takeoff to landing. These drones can provide farmers with three types of detailed views. First, seeing a crop from the air can reveal patterns that expose everything from irrigation problems to soil variation and even pest and fungal infestations that aren’t apparent at eye level. Second, airborne cameras can take multispectral images, capturing data from the infrared as well as the visual spectrum, which can be combined to create a view of the crop that highlights differences between healthy and distressed plants in a way that can’t be seen with the naked eye. Finally, a drone can survey a crop every week, every day, or even every hour. Combined to create a time-series animation, that imagery can show changes in the crop, revealing trouble spots or opportunities for better crop management. This allows for precision farming. For example, one area with a pest infestation can be identified using spectral imaging and sprayed for before spreading, greatly reducing the farm's operating cost.

The reality is that drones will be just one part of a multifaceted solution that will include decreasing CO2 emissions, GMOs, etc. However, unmanned aircraft are now clearly part of a trend toward increasingly data-driven agriculture which have been shown to increase crop yield by as much as 15% while decreasing production costs by as much as 25%! So given the choice between a grasshopper burger and an unmanned farmer, which will you chose?

For a short clip of these aircraft in action, click HERE.