Hosted by SALL , contributed by Roee Hermoni on 13 July 2023
רקע
Precision Agriculture is a field in agriculture research which aims to provide new technological tools for farmers to help them grow better crops with shorter timeframe and less use of pesticides and fertilizers.
Our students learns about many subjects of agriculture and technology and one of the subjects was about using drones to take picture of crop fields and monitor them over time.
מטרה
When farmers plants new trees they need to take care of them and make sure they get all the conditions needed for them to grow unless they will die shortly and won't produce fruits.
When a farmer has many fields and many crops cycles it become almost impossible to monitor every new tree that he planted and sometimes they found the problems too late after a lot of the new trees have died.
For the students, this type of solution using drones offers them a new and exciting subject to learn, a fun way of monitoring the fields and the opportunity to cooperate with farmers close to their homes.
יצירה משותפת עם גורמי קהילה
We first approached the farmers with the idea to offer them a fast and simple way to monitor large fields. we knew they have several new fields to monitor and at the stage when the trees are young it is very important to detect early problems.
Meanwhile, we have contacted a leading expert in drone flying of agriculture fields who agreed to lend us one of his drones and instruct the students about drone flying and the use of the camera to monitor the field.
The drone expert also agreed to gave the students access to a website which software enable them to create orthophoto using a large amount of photos taken by the drone. this expert and the farmers continued to work with us for the entire duration of the project.
הטמעה
Co-Creation - the problem we selected was chosen after a dialogue between the farmers and the students. the students told them about the drone and its capabilities and the farmers suggest using it on new fields when the monitoring is very important.
Exploration - We knew from that start the the drones was the best possible solution for our problem and we didn't need much time to explore options and went straight to experiment with the drone
Experimentation - The 1st time the drone was used it was by the teacher alone to find out how much time does it take and identifying any problems which may arise when bring the students to fly drone. After that we brought the students every week using a bus and they were in charge of flying the drones and taking pictures of the field.
Evaluation - Once we've upload the picture to the site and used the software to create orthophoto, the students started to identify any problem within the field and we passed the information back to the farmers who went and check on said problems.
רפלקציה
Personally I enjoyed the connecting between my students and the farmers from my hometown.
I think the students learned a lot about monitoring fields and the use of drones for practical reasons and not just for fun. It helped them also to see that their knowledge of new technology is needed in many fields which is an opportunity for future jobs after they graduate.
For the community and the farmers it helped showcasing new technology they were not aware of and the use of said technology in making their jobs easier and better. They were happy to get the results and the analysis from the students.
The cooperation between the sides worked great but it was short-lived. It was difficult to bring the students every week to the fields so we couldn't keep up the project for the entire year.
Futurel Plans
I would like to expand the project to more fields and a longer time period.
I could get the students that were in this project to teach new younger students about flying a drone and analyzing orthophoto so that I will have more students operating the drones and they will be able to monitor more fields for the farmers and give back faster results about the fields.
I would also like to expand the project of monitoring using drones to other fields besides agriculture - monitoring traffic and parking space in the city. identifying waste piles in the city and any other problems that the students will think of by themselves.