FSA Aerial Photography Using Drones?

FCW has a post on USDA's IT budget requests.  It includes this paragraph:

Then there's the outright fanciful. When the Federal Aviation Administration issued permits allowing commercial drones to be used in agriculture, USDA set plans in motion for its own implementation. To plan for resource allocation and budgeting, the department will need big-data analysis of crop imagery and related data gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles.

So I go to the FSA website and search for "drones", get two supposed hits although I don't see the word within the document, but one of them discusses four-band aerial photography as being available in some states.  

Agriculture and Drones

An old story and a little confused.  The guy was a fighter pilot, but operated drones in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I guess he was a converted fighter pilot.  Anyhow he's got a drone business in Idaho, has FAA approval to photograph farms, and charges $3 an acre for the data.

I wonder how FSA/USDA aerial photography and drone photography will impact each other?

Aerial Photography and Drones

Farm Policy reports that NRCS got questioned over the possible use of drones for their work:

Rep. Sanford Bishop: “Can you tell us if you have any plans to utilize drones to assist in the collection of information, because you do a lot of photography, put a lot of contracts out to take pictures, and there’s a tremendous amount of interest in the use of drones in agriculture, particularly in assisting the optimal design and layout of fields for water assessments and other related issues.
“Have you looked at this issue? Are there any current interagency discussions with FAA or other agencies concerning the growth in the use of drones? Obviously there are some security issues involved, but there’s also a great deal of interest for commercializing that practice and using it in agriculture.”
Mr. Jason Weller: “Absolutely. It’s a new technology, but we also have to be careful because folks do have privacy concerns. The FAA also had safety concerns. So in part NRCS, we sort of said full stop, let’s wait for FAA to actually come out with a rule.
“Now that the rule has been issued, we’re trying to figure out how the NRCS can work within that to do remote sensing, but in a way that protects privacy, assure landowners who are not there there’s a regulatory component, because I know folks have some concerns when the federal government starts flying drones over their property. So we just need to make sure NRCS is doing this technology in a way that’s appropriate, that’s sensitive to landowners’ concerns, but also then helps us do a better job of managing resources.”

 The question may be whether the use of drones by USDA agencies evolves from the field/bubbles up or is top-down, or some mixture.  My guess is there will be more experimentation at the local office level than WDC is expecting or will realize.  Drones are too cheap for it to be otherwise.

Robot Day: Cows and Grapes

The NY Times has an article on milking robots. 
I'd read about robotic milkers before, perhaps even posted on them, but this is the first report describing units with no human intervention, meaning the cows can determine when they want to be milked!  So the march of technology has the effect of increasing the "agency" of cows, making for more contented cows, I suppose.  (Was it Elsie, the Carnation cow, which keyed their ad campaigns in the 1950's?   NO, my memory is faulty--Elsie was the Borden's cow.  And, coincidentally, one of the dairymen in the article is named Borden, a seventh-generation farmer.)  Will the crunchy food movement celebrate this advance in animal liberation? 

Seriously, this and similar advances elsewhere in farming pose the problem for the farmer: give up, get out, grow up.  You need a bigger operation to make the best use of machines (although apparently California operations are too big) or cope with new regulations, etc.   The other problem is the infrastructure.  If you're depending on a machine to milk your cows, you can't afford power outages (hand-milking even 12 cows when the power goes off is not fun).  And you can't afford malfunctions--I assume the vendors have some support system to provide loaner units with a very short response time, like 1-3 hours.

Elsewhere, Technology Review has a post on agricultural drones. I wonder when FSA will start using them?

FSA and Drones

Via Marginal Revolution, here's a piece on how archeologists are using drones in their work.

Causes me to ask: when is FSA going to drones?  Last I knew FSA had a set of aerial photographs which were scaled and ortho-corrected (which I think means adjusted for changes in elevation) with which one could measure the area of a field, and a yearly set of slides taken from small planes to help identify which crop was in which field.  I'm sure that's changed as they've implemented their GIS system, but I'm not sure how.  On the theory the agency still needs to spot-check the accuracy of what they're being told by the farmer, I'd assume there's still some aerial slides being taken.  Drones might be a better approach (except for all the rules and regulations about their use, which presumably archeologists in Peru don't need to worry about).

FSA and Drones

Here's a NYtimes blog post on the proliferation of drones in civilian life.  We already have a college offering a bachelor's degree in them.  One of the uses people imagine for them is agriculture.  And there's this from an article in the print Times on the same subject.

"Mr. Anderson, in contrast, said that later this year, his company would introduce a helicopter for agricultural surveillance that would sell for less than $1,000. “That’s not per hour, that’s for the helicopter,” he said."

 Sounds to me like aerial photography is going to see a paradigm change.

EPA and Aerial Observation

From Farm Policy this morning:

"And, Pete Kasperowicz reported yesterday at The Hill’s Floor Action Blog that, “Rep. Shelley Moore Capito and 10 other House Republicans want to prevent the EPA from conducting air surveillance of farms.
“Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and 11 other House members introduced a bill Tuesday that would prevent the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from conducting aerial drone surveillance of farms to enforce the Clean Water Act, or using any other overhead surveillance.”

And this report on the farm bill passing the Senate this afternoon reports:

On a 56-43 vote, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) came surprisingly close to winning a flat ban on the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct any aerial surveillance to inspect or record images of agricultural operations

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77703.html#ixzz1ySpSETnZ

I'm just waiting for these efforts, or a renewed court challenge based on the Bill of Rights,  to spill over on FSA's aerial photography

Aerial Photography/Satellites: Commercial and Government

I posted the other day about NRCS using aerial observation to check compliance with sod/swampbuster provisions.

There was a NY Times article today about conflict between the military and the National Reconnaissance Office.  It seems commercial satellites today are almost as good as the governments, particularly for the sort of imagery the military needs, and they're a lot cheaper.  So the issue is where to spend scarce dollars: on commercial contracts or developing the government's.

Along the same lines, I wonder if NRCS has looked at using Google Earth for a first crack at spotchecking practices.  Granted their imagery isn't updated often, certainly wouldn't be timely for FSA purposes, but it might work for some NRCS purposes.  Matter of fact, if the district conservationist "flew" the county through Google Earth once a year, couldn't she/he learn something?

Down the line, maybe APFO should tap into the commercial satellite facilities?

[Updated: added title]