Recent digital technology improvements have spawned the ability to scan entire fields quickly and inexpensively with drones, then provide maps identifying specific weeds and their locations — all in about 12 hours

For the past 3 years, Minnesota-based plant analytics service Sentera has been proving its in-house designed sensors are capable of pin-pointing specific weed species as small as ¼ inch and verifying those findings with university-based ground-truthing research. The correlations of what Sentera’s drones are seeing and what agronomists on the ground find are about 99%.

Eric Taipale, Sentera’s chief technology officer and founder, says the improvement in sensor resolution plus a corresponding recent leap in digital technology will make significant improvements in farm ROI by reducing herbicide use. Sentera’s technology allows full fields of drone footage to be analyzed in a readily usable form without stitching several files together.

In the Field

Sentera’s Aerial WeedScout has been under beta testing on about 10,000 Corn Belt acres over the past 3 seasons and has shown 70% savings in herbicide costs over traditional full-field broadcast applications.

“When we overfly a field, we know exactly which species of weeds are present and where, and that enables agronomists on the ground to determine the appropriate crop protection product and the quantity needed to treat the infestations,” Taipale says. “By treating only the areas affected by weed pressure, additional herbicides no longer will be applied to unaffected crops. The savings can be astounding.”

Sentera began developing Aerial WeedScout in 2018, and part of…