The Agriculture sector is utilizing the use of Drones more and more.

On Thursday, about 15-20 people took part in an Agricultural Drone Demonstration sponsored by Pioneer Co-op’s Agro Branch in Shaunavon.

Markus Weber with Land View Drones was on hand to showcase the way farmers and crops agrologists and use Drones to scout crops.

“The drone flies autonomously over the field, flying a grid pattern,  gathering data for the entire field.  Depending on the type of sensors that are on there, it can show you crop health status, crop stress, yield potential all types of other indicators. Then you can use that data with all of the other data you collected on the farm to make it efficient.”

Weber says by using it as a scouting tool it saves people time as it can help identify areas of concern so that they can then go to a specific spot as opposed to having to walk the whole field.

“We had an agronomist that hadn’t used Drones before, but he was extremely experienced.  That became obvious really quickly.  We put the goggles on him so he could see what the drone sees.  Within the first minute he was saying, look at that we’ve got a phosphorous deficiency over here. “

Farmers will need to go through training and be licensed with Transport Canada.

Weber notes most farm users will want to get a special flight operation certificate that authorizes you to fly commercially.

Transport Canada assumes that all farm use is commercial use.