How Does Corteva Agriscience Utilize their Unmanned Aircraft System Fleet?

Corteva Agriscience™ has an Unmanned Aircrafts System (UAS) fleet consisting of just over 1,200 pilots, who complete 40,000 flights annually. UAS technology is utilized in Commercial, Research & Seed Production teams globally.

Corteva utilizes DroneDeploy Software to map fields in minutes to conduct stand counts, identify variability and make in-field recommendations.

There are several different flight tasks that can be completed off line at the field’s edge.

Stand Count

DroneDeploy partnered with Corteva Agriscience to leverage machine learning to assess early-season crop emergence quickly and accurately with the ability to distinguish male and female rows.

The system can also easily identify areas of good, moderate, and poor emergence with summarized population scores, gap counts and annotated images. It can customize mission plans based on crop type, field area, flight path and row spacing.

Auto-enabled Terrain Awareness ensures consistent capture height above the crop canopy to deliver accurate stand counts for every field.

Standard Flight

This allows Corteva employees to fly over the field to assess crop health, enabling them to navigate directly to problem spots. The flight saves them hours of manual scouting time. They can spot crop stress and eliminate threats to fields such as disease, parasites, fungi, and pivot issues. Once the flight is complete, photo documentation is used to validate product applications and recommended treatments.

Panorama 360 Degree View

This task does not provide any data per se, but it allows agronomists to identify gaps in the field and variations in a crop in just a few short minutes. The UAS captures 26 photos all in the same spot, providing a quick snapshot of the field so agronomists can navigate to the problem areas if need be.

Forage Volume Measurements

Corteva utilizes this flight task to determine silage pile and bunker volume measurements.

The UAS captures elevation (floor, bunker height, silage) for volume measurements. Weight or tonnage of silage can also be calculated if a density is provided. This concept was created to be used in construction for measuring amounts of material but has become popular with Corteva’s customers that raise beef or dairy cattle.

Within the commercial teams, Corteva currently utilizes DJI drones which include the Mavic 2 Pro, Phantom 4 Pro and Mavic Air 2S.