Since 1999, Farmers Edge Precision Consulting of Pilot Mound, Man., has been one of the leaders in bridging the gap between farmers and the satellite infrared photos taken of their fields.
The company is in the business of turning coloured blotches into meaningful information for producers.
Farmers Edge agronomist Curtis MacKinnon says the new generation of high resolution digital aerial photos taken by low-flying remote control aircraft have a lot in common with the fuzzier satellite photos his company has been using for the past eight years.
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“At the end of the day, they both have to extract value for the farmer. They have to be more than pretty pictures,” MacKinnon said.
“We talked to Crop Cam a couple years ago about buying some of their airplanes, but at that time, all they had was a true colour image. We need infrared to be of value to the farmer.”
MacKinnon said anything less than full infrared capacity is just a pretty picture.
However, he added, it’s a different story now that Greg Lewis of On Demand Imagery Solutions (ODIS) has proven that the Crop Cam aircraft can handle high resolution infrared.
“For our kind of business, I think there’s going to be a good fit for remote control airplanes for targeted, site-specific trouble-shooting and field scouting,” MacKinnon said.
“If I’m working with a producer on a certain problem in a field, I can fly the field with an infrared equipped remote plane to pinpoint the spots for me. And we can do it on the day we need it.”
Although he thinks trouble-shooting will be more important to his company than broad-scale field scouting, MacKinnon said it will probably become valuable for a lot more than just site-specific work.
“If you can fly a thousand acres or more in a day, that’s not bad. It can become useful for a lot of things, such as counting cattle or bales. It’s much better resolution than a satellite. And if you want a conventional airplane, you might have to wait a year,” he said.
“The cost seems quite reasonable, but you’ve got to factor in replacement costs. If you’re good at what you do, the aircraft should last a long time. But I fly remote control aircraft myself, so I know what happens. They crash. Sooner or later, it will crash. Believe me.”
MacKinnon said he would like to work with ODIS on variety and fertility trials. For field trials, the low-flying Crop Cam can give them much higher resolution than a satellite.
“If you’re running half-mile strip trials, for instance, I can see flying them weekly. In fact, if I were someone like Bayer Crop Science, I’d be flying every one of my strip trials once a week.”
Although MacKinnon thinks agri-business stands to gain from ODIS’s recent merging of divergent technologies, he said farmers will ultimately see the greatest benefit on their own fields.
The merging of unrelated technologies can create a new tool that’s more powerful than the sum of the individual components. That’s the result Lewis achieved when he combined remote image sensing software, near infrared (NIR) photography, digital cameras with transmitters, remote control aircraft and GPS autopilot.
Lewis can’t hide his enthusiasm for the project.
“I saw the potential of all these amazing technologies and what we could do if we just pulled it all together,” he said.
“The whole idea is that experts in the field, like agronomists, can now begin to develop the specific applications they need for agriculture. What I’ve accomplished so far is proof of concept. It shows people that these technologies exist, that we can make them work together and they have value for the farmer.”
Lewis’s Brandon-based business flies a Crop Cam remote control aircraft equipped with two belly-mounted digital cameras that are GPS georeferenced to document exact positions in a field.
The software can manipulate the camera data to provide four types of images: true colour; black and white NIR; false colour NIR and NDVI.
True colour
This is the traditional aerial image that any modern digital or conventional film camera can produce. It only contains three bands or wavelengths: red, green and blue.
Lewis said a lot of useful information can be gained from this image. For farmers, true colour images visually identify areas that have low or no growth.
These areas show much less green compared to the areas with lush vegetation.
True colour photos could be particularly useful when identifying areas that have been damaged by hail, wind or standing water. If the photos were georeferenced, accurate acreages could be calculated without having to walk the entire field.
Lewis said research has developed algorithms that compare the amount of reflected green light to the amount of reflected red light. In the future, this method may mean that a conventional true colour aerial photo can quantify the amount of vegetation in the picture.
Black and white NIR
This image represents only one band of the electromagnetic spectrum that falls in the near infrared portion.
NIR wavelengths are important to farmers because NIR energy is better at assessing the amount of biomass in a pixel as compared to the green band of a true colour photo.
This is because the cell structure of a healthy plant reflects higher amounts of NIR compared to plant cells that are under stress.
One way to think of this is to compare images of real and artificial plants. In the true colour photo, both plants can have the exact same green appearance, which is the basis of determining vegetation vigour with colour photographs.
The two plants would look different in the NIR photo because the real plant and its cell structure would reflect high amounts of NIR energy and appear white. The artificial plant would look dark because it would absorb the majority of the NIR.
The accompanying photograph came from a modified consumer grade digital camera with modified internal optics to capture electromagnetic wavelengths from 330 to 1,200 nanometres.
These wavelengths cover the true colours of blue, green and red and the near infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Consequently, a filter was used to block the visual wavelengths, resulting in 50 percent energy transmission at the 780 nm wavelength and 99 percent transmission at the 830 nm wavelength. This allowed only the near infrared energy to be presented to the camera, providing a near infrared image.
Areas on the photo that appear white are reflecting high amounts of NIR energy, which is typical of areas with higher vegetation. As well, areas that have water and lower vegetation amounts appear dark.
False colour NIR
This type of multispectral photography combines false colour and NIR.
While true colour photos contain only red, green and blue, multispectral photos contain more than three bands and usually have measurements beyond the visual portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This false colour image has four bands or channels that are blue, green, red and near infrared, but the user can set what wavelengths each colour is going to represent.
In the accompanying photograph, red represents the near infrared band, green represents the red band and blue the green band. This type of image is commonly referred to as a false infrared image because the red is falsely representing near infrared energy.
From this we see that areas with high amounts of red or white have vegetation. This identification is strictly a visual analysis performed by the user.
NDVI
NDVI photography applies a number rating to the vegetative cover. The resulting image is a colour gradient of a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI).
This process looks at each pixel in the image and compares the difference between the NIR and the colour red.
The result of this calculation can theoretically range from minus one for no vegetation to one for complete vegetation.
With this calculation, the identification of low and high biomass areas can now be quantified rather than merely described with a simple visual analysis as is done with true and false colour NIR images.
Photographs taken on different days can be compared. The ability to calculate high-resolution NDVI areas on demand allows agronomists and farmers to evaluate a crop’s progress relative to other portions of the field and also to itself.
NDVI offers the ability to track a crop and determine areas with biomass above and below the average.
A user can also see areas that have lost biomass. This will not identify the cause of the problem, but may allow it to be corrected before it’s too large or too late.
Who benefits?
Lewis said none of the technology in his system is new.
“Nothing I’m doing has the potential for a patent or a copyright. Everything I use has already been invented and is on the market. It’s just never been assembled and used like this before.”
As an example, he said the MultiSpec software package that calculates the NDVI image is available to anyone for free.
Although he paid for his research himself, Lewis said Assiniboine Community College in Brandon, where he teaches GIS technology, has recently come on board. He is open to working with other researchers, he added.
“I teach, so I only have nine weeks available in the summer to work on this. Obviously I can’t handle it all. But there’s tremendous research potential and business potential here. A high school student can fly the airplane and gather the images. The challenge is processing the maps, extrapolating data and then analyzing it and using it,” he said.
“I want to see this technology grow to the point where crop consultants and farmers use it on a regular basis. Now that I’ve got this started, I can’t just walk away from it. I want to see something happen from all this.”
For more information, contact Curtis MacKinnon at 204-825-2331 or visit www.farmersedge.ca, or contact Greg Lewis at 204-720-4994 or visit www.ODIS.ca.
