Learn everything you need to know on boosting soybean success and yield with tested & easy-to-use drone technology.
If you look at the statistics from the past decades, you’ll see that soybeans have been among the most popular and most in-demand crops on the global Ag market.
According to farmers in the US and globally, drone technology is one of the best ways of improving the ROI of soybeans.
Many of today’s soybean farmers are using drones to irrigate and apply herbicides. But apart from using drones as Ag machinery, drones are popular as data collection devices, which scan every inch of the field and help soybean farmers obtain highly valuable data.
WHY? — drone data is much more accurate and reliable than the traditional way of walking the field, plus it saves tons of time since it can scan large fields in a short amount of time.
The benefits of using drone technology with soybeans
Soybean growers in the US are running out of time to get their spring seeds in the ground. This has already affected their yields with a potential decrease of 15%.
To ensure they meet their yield goals, soybean growers have to know things like
- How many plants have successfully emerged?
- Are my plants healthy?
- Weed zones, how much of my field is affected?
- Is it necessary to apply fertilizer to avoid low yield?
Farmers will soon need to decide: Plant late and risk losing crops to an early frost; or wait’till the deadline and take a loss on the seeds they’re weren’t able to get into the ground.
If these questions are not dealt with in time, soybean growers can be looking at serious losses at the end of the season. In addition to this, it’s often difficult to determine the exact amount of seeds, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, storage, insurances, fuel and oil with traditional methods — and purchasing resources for just 10 acres more than required can lead to four-figure extra costs!
Ready to give it a shot?
By creating a drone map of the soybean field (which is merely a visual depiction of your field) and by analyzing this map with a drone data processing app, it is possible to get a clear report of what is going on in every inch of the field, allowing soybean growers to purchase and apply treatment only where and when needed. This, in return, allows you to reduce production costs, increase productivity, optimize chemical application and save money on input costs.
To illustrate this, here is an example of how much soybean growers can save on input costs and chemicals on a 40-acre soybean field with reports from the drone data processing app Agremo:
Besides saving money on direct treatment costs like herbicides, fertilizer, and pesticides, the reports also help you save on fuel and mechanization, all thanks to the fact that the reports show the exact location of problem areas and thus allow you to perform localized actions. And since this data is simple and quick to get, growers have a much larger chance of spotting drawbacks in time, i.e. before they affect the crop’s performance and cause significant yield loss.
Agremo also performs the most accurate plant counting analyses, which can be used to evaluate seed quality, plant emergence and germination rate. With this report, soybean growers get to see all areas with potential crop loss, compare it to the expected results and find out if it would be appropriate to replant:
In the example above, you see that the report shows that the amount of plants in this soybean field (5.686.789) is 19% lower than expected, which is a loss of 1.337.711. When performing early yield estimations or when evaluating replantings or seed quality, this information is paramount, since it allows you to calculate the exact ROI of the measures which are about to be implemented. And when performing actions like replantings or fertilizer applications, the maps on page two will help you get to the exact location of the missing plants — no need for expensive mass treatments or inaccurate estimates.
By calculating the precise size of the field’s accurate arable area with an arable area report from Agremo, soybean growers can achieve tremendous input and resource savings.
How to get started with using drone technology in agriculture
To put your own drone to use, follow these simple steps:
First, collect the required data by capturing images of the soybean field using any commercially available drone.
After that, stitch the drone images together to create a map (you can use any stitching tool you like — many of our users use DroneDeploy), upload it to the Agremo app and choose the analysis you want. Agremo currently offers 12 different plant health and plant counting analyses.
If you are unsure as to which drone data analysis would be the most beneficial to your soybean field, simply download the free Agremo soybean mapping calendar below to see which analysis to perform at which stage. All Agremo mapping calendars were tried and tested by experienced agriculture drone tech experts and all analyses are available on the Agremo app.
