Could North Dakota Drones Help Feed The World?

The following piece has nothing to do with cars, but covers subjects I'm quite interested in: sustainability and feeding the world. I'd written this piece for an international publication, but due to editorial adjustments, it was never used. Its home is now on here...

Farming crops is intensive, expensive and quite often, inefficient. Large areas of farmland often covering areas of several hundreds of acres, face constant threats from pests and weeds, significantly damaging the output of a farm. And with an increasing number of the world’s population facing the prospect of going hungry, these issues are quite literally killers.

When visiting 2014 Farnborough International Airshow, I met representatives from the state of North Dakota and the University of North Dakota (UND). Together, they believe they’re developing a solution that could help combat these food issues, working on technology that could enable farmers to use unmanned drones to monitor their crops.

Unmanned drones do exactly what they say on the tin - they fly without a pilot on board - and therefore can be controlled from pretty much any location on the ground. Testing for these vehicles has been taking place at the Northern Plains Test Site in North Dakota, the first of its kind in the US.

Both the state and UND work together at this site, sharing knowledge and findings to better understand how unmanned aerial system (UAS) drones can be used to find trends in crop growth. These findings can then be used to give farmers a better understanding of where their crops may be performing best and worst, and then ideas of how to better the situation.

To illustrate with an example, let’s imagine an area of crop may be underperforming due to pest infestation. The findings of the drones will enable farmers to pinpoint exactly where the issue is happening, to then target that area specifically with pesticides. This not only improves the situation at that location, but also helps to minimise the amount of pesticides used, reducing costs and improving output, as well as minimising negative environmental impacts. North Dakota calls it ‘Precision Agriculture.’

Trevor Woods, the site’s Technical Manager, told me that the relationship between state and University is of incredibly high importance. “UND is the backbone of the test site. It provides the staff, processes and knowledge from research. In fact UND has been researching these technologies since 2003, so there’s a substantial amount of knowledge to be shared.”

Working on the project with Woods is Terry Sando, the UAS Sector Senior Manager in North Dakota. Sando emphasised the savings in costs the use of these drones could bring. “We’d like to have a goal of 50 per cent savings, but we’re going for about 30 to 35 per cent on input costs as well as herbicides and pesticides.”

These savings could bring substantial benefits, especially if the technology is used internationally. Sando said “with another 2.3 billion mouths to feed by 2050, we have to bring out as much efficiency in farming as possible.”

And nowhere is that efficiency needed more than in China. China’s population is expected to soar beyond 1.5 billion people by 2030, but a significant 260 million farmers are expected to leave their land for the cities. The same number of farmers have already made the move since 1978, meaning a fast growing population is facing a fast shrinking food supply.

Such is the shift from self sufficiency to dependency on imports, that China’s annual imports of commodities, goods and services are predicted to total $10 trillion by 2018, and it’s already the world’s highest net importer according to the WTO. A system to help optimise the production of food will therefore be of massive importance if China is to feed its population, something its communist government will no doubt know.

It’s for this reason, across the North Pacific Ocean from China and in the Upper Midwestern region of the US, drone technology could offer a major helping hand. In fact, it’s already begun to help China, as Woods explained.

“We have 120 aircraft that fly over 30,000 flight hours a year, and half of these hours are used for international training. Countries like China, Taiwan, Japan and Saudi Arabia all benefit with training for their countrymen, enabling them to take the skills home and pass on the knowledge. We even have an undergraduate degree programme open to international students.”

Furthering this international involvement, is a new development called Grand Sky. Sando told us that “it’s a 217 acre high technology business park where we hope we can develop a cluster of technology partners, that can feed on each other's expertise in unmanned systems. We’ve had contact from organisations in China and Singapore already.”

Despite the exciting prospect of technology that can improve farming efficiency by something like a third, both Woods and Sando wanted to emphasise that this technology was still very much in an experimental phase. But the potential is certainly there, and it is very large indeed. Outside of crop farming, fisheries, fracking sites and renewable energy systems could be monitored by the drone’s complex sensors, enabling optimisation in each industry.

It’s still early days for North Dakota’s Precision Agriculture drones, but there’s no doubting they could be instrumental in helping reduce the costs of farming one day. More importantly though, they could also be incredibly useful in one of the biggest issues to ever face mankind: feeding an ever growing global population in times of increasing climate instability. North Dakota’s drones, it seems, really could save lives.