GUWAHATI, Jan 22 - Tea industry of the State is going to explore the possibilities of using drones in plantations for better crop management.
Disclosing this here today, advisor to the North Eastern Tea Association (NETA), Bidyananda Barkakoty said that possibilities of using drones in the areas of crop monitoring against pest attack, weed invasion, crop stress, surveillance and spraying of fertilizer and pesticides, etc., and land/ crop management in matters of drainage and replantation, etc., are being explored.
In this connection, the tea industry organised a talk on the prospects of application of drones in agriculture and plantation crops monitoring. It was delivered by Dr Manzul Kumar Hazarika, Director of Geoinformatics Center of the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok at the ABITA office here today.
Dr Hazarika said drones can be great surveillance tools for monitoring agriculture and plantation crops regularly at a reasonable cost. The main advantage of drones is data acquisition at a very high spatial resolution with high accuracy and they are easy to deploy on demand with no hindrance from clouds unlike earth-observation satellites.
Drones can contribute to much-needed quick surveillance of tea gardens for pest and insect attacks to take actions at the very early stage in order to minimise the reaction time and reduction in pesticide and insecticide volume.
Using multi-spectral sensors, drones can also produce images showing the conditions of tea plants in terms of productivity as well as their maturity levels. Using very high resolution cameras, maps produced by drones will be helpful to planning and taking decisions for plantations, Dr Hazarika said.
