AGRICULTURAL NEWS - For a farmer managing a macadamia orchard, certain things are non-negotiable.
You need to know your exact tree count, you have to work your yields back to kilograms of dry nut-in-shell yield per tree, and you need to ascertain where problems lie so that you can address them rapidly and effectively.
This is according to Martin Taljaard, founder of Carbomax, a company that uses drone technology to help macadamia farmers improve production.
Martin works with Jaco Prinsloo, a consultant at Loskop ICT, a fertiliser company based in Marble Hall, Limpopo, to pair drone technology with orchard-specific fertilisation and soil-specific moisture management, making production more precise than ever.
Martin’s involvement in this specialist field began through his work with Aerobotics, a Cape Town-based aerial data analytics company.
Aerobotics had developed software that uses infrared images from drones to assess whether trees are photosynthesising efficiently. To do this, it analyses reflections of chlorophyll, an indicator of photosynthesis.
Algorithms use the data to create a normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), allowing users to identify unhealthy plants.
“Cameras fitted to a drone can identify problem areas. Using software combined with a mobile app, you can go to a specific spot in an orchard and determine the possible causes of problems,” explains Jaco.
Soil and leaf samples are taken to verify that there is a problem, and then to identify possible shortages or imbalances in a tree or an area.
