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Almond Bloom Mapping

Drone Survey/Mapping

Creating an orthomosaic map of an almond orchard in bloom to count and locate problem tree varieties.

Date

April 2023

Danley Farms

South west of Willows, California. A Family Farm almond orchard.

March 2nd 2023

Mission and orthomosaic processing.

Pilot, Processor

Every portion of this mission was completed by myself.

Drone Survey/Mapping

An example of how drones are helping with agriculture by mapping fields and gaining highly useful information from the surveys.

Using the survey function of my Mavic 3T, I flew a map of all of our orchards in full bloom. This is done by flying a grid at a set height and taking a photo facing directly down at second length intervals. Once the flying portion of the mission is over, all of the images are uploaded and processed through Web ODM to create a georeferenced orthomosaic map in one composite image that can be overlayed onto Google Earth and Maps. Additionally, the various spectrums of light can be filtered out in post processing.

In the case of this project, this survey was taken to monitor bloom density in an orchard fully in bloom. This orchard was known to have an underperforming variety of pollinator trees in every fourth row. Using this map, we were able to get an accurate count of how many problem trees this orchard had as well as precisely where in the orchard the issues were located.

With map in hand, workers went through and removed all of the limbs from the problem trees except for one to ensure the tree continued to grow. Following behind them came a crew to graft new branches on from better root stock that would produce blossoms. By grafting on new branches, the tree would begin to produce blossoms next fruiting year, with full production expected within 2 years. This is drastically faster as well as less time consuming and labor intensive as tearing out and replanting every tree that may have issues.

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