2019 ASHS Annual Conference

This presentation is to display a small Unmanned Arial System (sUAS) in promoting vegetable crop management. The device is DJI Phantom 4 Pro associated with a multispectral sensor – double 4k developed by Sentera specifically for agricultural purposes. The vegetable crops that have been surveyed include tomato, sweet corn, beans, and okra. The data were processed with corresponding software, such as sentera FieldAgent and Drone Deploy. The result showed that in a single flight, multiple images including Red, Green and Blue (RGB), Near-Infrared (NIR), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Normalized Difference Red Edge (NDRE) were collected and processed. These data could be used to generate various Management Zones based on seed germination rate, stress of soil nutrient or moisture, plant healthy status, damages from insects or diseases, which can provide timely information to growers for their field management practices in order to reduce the yield loss. Therefore, the application of this up-to-date technology has shown a great potential in improving the Best Management Practice (BMP) for the development of sustainable agriculture.