Maize
Early weeks decide it, and birds finish it
Establishment counts, early weed competition, corn borer pressure and flocks working the cobs at ripening.
Blocks of 5 to 80 hectares, with deterrence stations on the blocks under pressure.
Book a field visit
What actually goes wrong
Maize forgives nothing in the first six weeks. A gappy stand cannot be fixed later, and weeds that get away before the canopy closes take yield directly. Then at the other end of the season, once the cobs are filling, flocks move in and a fixed deterrent stops working after a fortnight. Between those two ends the crop is too tall to walk into and too dense to see through.
How we set it up
A counting flight at the three to five leaf stage sets the establishment number and finds the gaps. Weed scans run before the post-emergence window and produce a spot-spray prescription. Once the crop is over head height, flights are the only practical way to see inside the block, so pest surveillance runs on a fixed cadence. At ripening, camera triggered deterrence responds to flocks rather than running on a timer.
The flight calendar across a season
-
Plant counts per square metre and the gap map.
-
Weed mapping for the post-emergence spot-spray prescription.
-
Nitrogen top-up zoning and pest surveillance from above.
-
Bird pressure monitoring and on-demand deterrence.
-
Yield estimate and lodging assessment for the chopping order.
Capabilities in play, in order of how much they carry
-
Targeted weed control
Spray the weeds, not the field
Cameras and on-board models find weeds plant by plant, then only the affected square metres get treated.
-
Yield forecasting
Count what is actually out there
Drones count plants, fruit or ears and turn the counts into a yield estimate for each part of the field.
-
Automated pest monitoring
Standing patrol over every hectare
Regular flights check fields for pest damage and mark the affected areas on a map you can act on.
-
Autonomous bird deterrence
Move the flock without living next to a gas gun
Drones clear birds from ripening crops on demand, instead of a permanent noise source that birds learn to ignore.
-
Precision fertilisation
Feed the rows that are short
The system works out which parts of the crop are under-supplied and builds a variable rate map for the spreader.
-
Autonomous drone network
Docked, charged, and out again at first light
Drones launch from charging stations on their own schedule, cover the fields and dock again without a driver.
What you end up with
Recorded on your fields, flight by flight. Not a projection.
- Establishment counted rather than estimated from a pacing walk
- Weed treatment confined to mapped zones before canopy closure
- Pest and bird pressure logged by block and hour across the season
- Chopping order set from measured yield, not from the gate view
More in Arable