The Niksic municipality represents a rich area for agricultural production. Bearing this in mind, IEC Tehnopolis, by using innovative technologies and recognizing the needs of agricultural producers for monitoring and analyzing vegetation growth over a certain period, provided support for 10 of them in the territory of the Niksic municipality.
This way, we obtained data that indicated potential problems during the growth of the analyzed vegetation to the agricultural producers. This type of crop condition analysis has numerous benefits, but most importantly, it represents:
- Quick and precise agriculture,
- Modern and fast crop control, and
- Efficient monitoring of the vegetation progress process and the quality of crops.
The process of monitoring the progress of vegetation and the quality of crops is tracked by the Parrot Bluegrass Fields drone, which provides the capability of mapping and analyzing crops. It is available at the Biotechnological Laboratory, BioLab Tehnopolis. The drone is part of the resources of our FILA innovative laboratory equipped within the project “Strengthening and enhancing the cross-border innovation network through fertilization and innovation laboratories in agri-food to strengthen the link between research and small and medium-sized enterprises”.
The Parrot Bluegrass Fields drone is equipped with two sensors, RGB and Parrot Sequoia. The RGB sensor is capable of recording HD-resolution video and high-quality photographs and is used for easier visual inspection of crops planted at the site. Sequoia consists of four sensors that take photographs in four bands: green, red, red edge, and near-infrared (NIR). Through software processing of the photographs taken in these four bands, maps with different vegetative indexes of the desired location can be created. They represent a measure of the health condition of the vegetation based on how plants reflect radiation of certain wavelengths. By analyzing NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) maps that the drone creates, areas where vegetation is less advanced can be easily localized.
After each flight, software processing of the collected crop data, using the Pix4Dfields program, generates reports in the form of index maps for analyzing crop performance. The monitoring results have shown and timely located potential problems, which will contribute to agricultural producers reacting quickly and considering solutions to improve quality and prevent yield loss.
Over three months, three flights were conducted for each agricultural producer, per the vegetative cycle of the monitored culture. After checking the defined localities, agricultural producers received a detailed report based on which they could monitor the development of their crops in different stages.
