CIC: Drones enable precision targeting of fertiliser, agro-chemicals

Smart farming:

CIC Holdings PLC (CIC) has begun flying drones to scan fields and distribute agro chemicals and fertilizer with minimum human involvement and wastage, using its own data sets from years of crop research.

"With this project we hope to reduce the misuse of agro chemicals (pesticides and fertilizer) while reducing the human exposure to agro chemicals in Sri Lanka," Managing Director, CIC Holdings, Samantha Ranatunga said.

"CIC has been a pioneer in agriculture and research and this is a result of that effort. This method will also help to reduce the excess amount of agro chemicals and fertilizer released to the environment," he said.

This is the first time in the world that areas are being identified and automatically treated using the drone and GPS satellite positioning technology, the company said in a statement.

Manju Gunawardene, one of Sri Lanka's most recognized innovators, has been working on the project with CIC Holdings for the past 7 years.

"The country needs productivity increase in the agriculture sector to meet increasing food demand, to enhance farmer profitability as well as to optimize utilization of resources such as land, water, fertilizer to make the whole system more sustainable," Gunawardene said. "As a stepping stone in that direction, we thought of introducing this solution. The normal agro practice is that you observe and measure and finally respond to it which is time consuming, destructive to the field and has a high variability due to different perceptions of people," he said.

Gunawardene has won three gold medals and a silver medal at the Innovators Competition in Geneva, Switzerland. He started his career in 1990 by winning the National Inventors title and won the title again in 2012. He works as a consultant to CIC Precision Agriculture and runs his own research firm in India - he is Inventor, Senior Research Scientist and CEO at Hybrid Technologies.

CIC, a conglomerate with a business portfolio extending into Agri Produce, Health and Personal Care, Livestock Solutions, Industrial Solutions and Crop Solutions, said it will be offering this new technology as a service to farming communities.

"Unlike other countries we can't use fixed wing aircraft to distribute fertilizer as you need thousands of acres to do so," Gunawardene said. "We have small land masses - therefore, it's more practical to use drones. We will be operating the drones within the civil aviation regulations of Sri Lanka."

"Drones are not the heart of this project, the data set we have gathered with CIC is the heart of this entire solution. The company's research and development team has used studies and research on varies types of crops, growth and deficiency data for the past seven years to introduce this solution."

Gunawardene outlined the new three-step process used by CIC. The first is observation.

"The drone will fly over the field and collect data. This gives the farmer a different perspective of the field. Colour differences, variations and gaps where there is room for cultivation are not visible when you observe the field from ground level. Capturing the entire picture of the field from a higher perspective helps determine the first level of remedial action and engagement." Drone technology is also used for measurement.

The use of multi spectral cameras, special sensors and advanced software systems helps to differentiate healthy and unhealthy crops, the size of plants and especially detect infections, temperature of the soil and detect plant diseases, pest attacks and weeds using the NDVI Technology (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index).

"The most important part of the technology is the ability to run a check on the nutrition level of the soil. The captured data can be used as a yield prediction tool as well," the CIC statement said.

The third step is to respond. "The problem with the current manual practice is the use of resources such as water, manure, and pesticides in a haphazard manner," Gunawardene said. "There is high wastage, high human exposure, it is high cost and it is destructive as it leads to resource depletion and pollutes the environment.

"As the first step of reducing these effects, our automated drones will reduce human exposure and the amount of fertilizer and agro chemicals used.

The drones will only deploy the required amount of fertilizer to the areas with nutrient deficiencies and the agro chemicals only to areas affected with weeds using maps and captured data. These drones are also equipped with special instruments to repel wild elephants," Gunawardene said.

"Precision Agriculture helps to cut down all the drawbacks of the manual practice as it's extremely fast, low variability, low cost and most importantly it's non-destructive to the field.

The main objective at this juncture is to reduce inputs thereby ensuring a better harvest with use of 'Precision Agriculture Practices' or 'Smart farming'."