PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Chris Carroll has been flying planes in Aroostook County since he was 15, and now he’s joining the growing ranks of entrepreneurs pitching a new kind of aviation technology to farmers.
Carroll’s start-up company, Aero Imaging Solutions, is among the new generation of firms in “precision agriculture” offering unmanned aerial systems — better known as drones — with associated photo and sensing technology for a host of applications in farm and forestlands.
The eBee mapping drone from Swiss company senseFly, the same model used by Presque Isle precision agriculture startup Aero Imaging Solutions. (Courtesy of senseFly)
“The technology is so revolutionary in the way it can help people,” said Carroll, a sophomore studying business at the University of Maine at Orono.
Carroll, a licensed pilot, founded Aero Imaging Solutions last fall and began demonstrating the technology, and he’s starting work in earnest during this year’s growing season, hoping that the region’s large farmers will find a reason to hire him to get better insight into their crops.
The drone is equipped with a variety of cameras and sensors that can create maps with assessments metrics like nitrogen content and stress in plants and water content and soil compaction. (Compacted soil is a major concern to potato growers who use massive tractors and sprayers in fields throughout the growing season).
The cameras and sensors “can tell a plant’s health from how it reflects light,” Carroll said. “When a plant starts to change on the molecular scale, we can see the change in light reflectance even before it starts to change visibly with wilting or yellow or browning.”
Flying over a field, the drone collects data that is stored and later mapped out with software in colors: Red showing no or dead vegetation, yellow showing stressed vegetation, green showing good health.
That data can then be linked with farm management systems and a tractor-mounted GPS for precise applications of nutrients, for instance. The drones also have a 12-megapixel camera that can produce maps with 10 times the resolution of Google’s Satellite and Earth maps, Carroll said.
It’s a technology that can be used before, during and after the growing season, Carroll said. After a harvest, it’s useful to analyze compaction as well as changes to drainage patterns, he said.
“Farmers’ margins are becoming smaller and smaller, so precision agriculture is becoming more important,” Carroll said. “When you’re farming so much land, you don’t have time to walk the field, looking for rogues or diseases.”
Carroll said the roughly four-foot wide drone he’s using is from the Swiss company senseFly.
A post-harvest “normalized difference vegetation index” map of two fields of Hemphill Farms in Presque Isle, produced by Aero Imaging Solutions, a new drone mapping and precision agriculture company in Presque Isle.
(Courtesy of Chris Carroll )
The Federal Aviation Administration last September gave the final okay for commercial drone applications, with an extensive oversight and permitting process. While the drones are autonomous — flying over a preset course — Carroll said there’s always a licensed pilot ready to step in to fly them remotely, and the FAA requires licensed pilots for any commercial drone applications, even for farmers who want to operate their own drones on their own land.
This will be the first full growing season with commercially-available drone technology, although previously uses were permitted with special permits. At least a few County farmers have used drone mapping services, including LaJoie Growers of Van Buren, which partnered with Massachusetts-based company Raptor Maps.
Carroll said he’s also interested in deploying the drone technology to other land uses, including in real estate and forestry. Another kind of remote sensing known as LIDAR can be used to map out entire forests and other natural features.
And in the coming years and decades, Carroll expects new kinds of camera and sensor applications to evolve with drones.
“People are still finding ways to apply it,” he said.
