Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), are today becoming just as much a part of farmers' toolbox as tractors, working dogs or ag bikes. Far more than just a way to get a few nice photos from the air, drones are being used for everything from discretely monitoring livestock, quickly checking on fencing and other infrastructure to even spotting water leaks.

The opportunities for drones really are endless, says local farmer, drone manufacturer and educator, Ben Watts.

“If we went through the list you would have: checking fixed assets like fences, water, sheds, roads, boundaries; finding stock; checking stock without interrupting or intruding their space in the paddock, particularly calving cows and lambing ewes,” Ben said, explaining just a few of the many ways drones are being put to use on farms.

“Then you've got measuring plant health — we've got cherry farmers on Canobolas who are using it for plant health now, through to crops, viticulture, fodder production and silage.”

It was 13 years ago that Ben began looking into uses for drones in his own family-run mixed farming operations between Orange and Molong. First, just for checking pastures and watering points, but he quickly saw even greater potential.

With a background in corporate agriculture, where finding efficiencies and innovative ways to use technology and gather data are key, Ben started working with others in the industry to develop new ways of putting drones to use.

“My background — and I've travelled the world looking at and bringing technology back to Australia, just to use ourselves — was to find a way to record data, transfer that data into a consumable product that directors could glimpse and go, ‘okay, this is where we're charting’,” Ben said.

“I spent about eight years working with a tech company on ultrasound for animals and then we did individual stock management with EID (electronic identification) and some other technologies.

“And then we started looking at camera technology in a paddock for identifying animals. So it was just the next step… put the camera on something that can then move around over a large parcel of land.” 

But the real ‘x factor’ with drones, he said, is that it allows you to collect data from a paddock ten days before you’d see it in plants on the ground.

“That changes everything,” Ben said. “We can fly [a paddock] and look at that through a plant health reflectance map and it will show us all of the variations in high-growth areas, low-growth areas.”

Armed with this data, he said, you can then do variable treatment rates when applying topdressing or fertiliser, targeting only the areas that need it, improving yield and saving money.”

And adding other sensors such as thermal cameras to drones opens up a whole new world of possibilities, Ben said.

“We use it mainly for identifying livestock in hard-to-access areas, or it's good for the pest animals,” he said.

“But we've also just recently been working with some growers using it for irrigation monitoring, because they can check the water's actually getting where it was supposed to be getting… Are we wetting up where we thought we were. Do we have seepage in banks?”

The thermal cameras can spot leaks in poly water pipes and even be used to map water-filled potholes in roads.

And in construction, drones can create real-time three-dimensional images of earthworks or a building in progress and cross-reference them with engineering drawings.

“Ultimately, the code drives what the drone can do,” Ben said, explaining that he works with a small, international group of software developers on new applications.

For his own part, Ben and his family-run business BRACLA work on the hardware; designing and building new airframes to expand the physical capabilities of what a drone can do.

“We're sort of in the larger end,” he said. “There are some really good tech manufacturers who can do smaller and have big budgets to micro everything… we're trying to work on that larger end. So working from a 25-kilo, three-and-a-half metre up to 120-kilo six-metre airframes. ... and the idea of that is it gives you payload capacity and range.

“What we're looking at is drones that can stay in the air for upwards of three hours, and we've got some other projects working well beyond that  — with reasonable payloads,” he said.

“Then we've got some other even larger airframes, which is really about can it deploy products — so if it's an emergency response, whatever the emergency may require — if you've got a reasonable payload on board, somewhere in that sort of 15 to 35 kilos.”

While there is strong interest in drones from agriculture and other industries, Ben is still surprised that the uptake hasn’t been even greater.

“In my mind, this should be evolving much faster than it is; It's such an opportunity!” he enthused.

“Hopefully, what's happening is we've got some good people who are starting to come together in the central west who are like-minded, who can work together… Who knows, down the track, as this is changing, wouldn't it be great if there was a regional manufacturing capacity.”