Did you know that the world’s population is set to increase from seven billion people to more than nine billion in the next 40 years? In order to meet this growing demand, agricultural producers will have to increase food production by a staggering 70 to 100 percent. This all needs to happen in a world with increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and ever-rising farm input costs.

You probably have a pretty good sense that I am a firm believer that precision agriculture and information is a big part of the answer. This is all about leveraging technology to provide more timely and accurate data in a way to increase efficiency and productivity by cutting time and overall cost. It is about doing more with less. But how are we getting there?

One difficulty with wide adoption of UAVs, in general, is that companies develop and sell them with the mentality, ‘Here is a great solution… Lets go find a problem it can solve.’ As UAV companies are quickly discovering, the key to making a successful platform is to make it as hands-off, easy to use and as industry specific as possible. In agriculture, farmers are not interested in learning how to be, or dedicating somebody to be, a UAV operator. They need a tool that is a part of their everyday workflow.