Slashdot Mirror
UC Davis Investigates Using Helicopter Drones For Crop Dusting
cylonlover writes "Researchers at University of California, Davis, in cooperation with the Yamaha Motor Corporation, are testing UAV crop dusting on the Oakville Experimental Vineyard at the UC Oakville Station using a Yamaha RMax remote-controlled helicopter. The purpose is to study the adaptation of Japanese UAV crop dusting techniques for US agriculture, but not all the hurdles they face are technological."
The non-technological hurdles are exactly what you'd expect - government regulations, air-traffic restrictions and (restrictions on) emergency landing procedures.
Doesn't really seem like a problem - except in california, where realistic, useful legislation rarely passes on a permanent basis.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
This sounds like a decent application- using GPS this could be completely automated.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Yeah, except the term was coined a long time ago when the insecticide being applied was in powder form, hence the "dusting" name.
hackers just wait for some to hijack one and crop dust over area loaded with people.
They are not spraying DDT. Most modern pesticides (especially those used in aerial spraying) have little toxicity to humans. When there were protests about the safety of malathion used in aerial spraying to kill medflies in California, the governors chief-of-staff went on TV and drank a glass in front of the cameras.
The chemical use was Malathion. It is not as safe as you claim. Emphasis added by me.
Malathion itself is of low toxicity; however, absorption or ingestion into the human body readily results in its metabolism to malaoxon, which is substantially more toxic.[16] In studies of the effects of long-term exposure to oral ingestion of malaoxon in rats, malaoxon has been shown to be 61 times more toxic than malathion.[16] It is cleared from the body quickly, in three to five days.[17] According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency there is currently no reliable information on adverse health effects of chronic exposure to malathion.[18] Acute exposure to extremely high levels of malathion will cause body-wide symptoms whose intensity will be dependent on the severity of exposure. Possible symptoms include skin and eye irritation, cramps, nausea, diarrhea, excessive sweating, seizures and even death. Most symptoms tend to resolve within several weeks. Malathion present in untreated water is converted to malaoxon during the chlorination phase of water treatment, so malathion should not be used in waters that may be used as a source for drinking water, or any upstream waters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malathion
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
I work for an Ag company in the Pacific Northwest and I can tell you that while there is a use for UAV technology in agriculture, it is not an end all replacement for spraying and other applications. It lacks the payload to be efficient with all farms, many are too large to be sprayed in total with such a small device. Also the article seems to vilify the tractorand current methods to a certain degree, when in fact precision agriculture has helped implement gps, autosteer, and autoboom technology (among many other things) into modern agriculture already and has drastically increased the precision with which we apply fertilizers and crop protectants. I also don't understand why we are wasting money on research for this particular device when it already has decades of use and data available, especially when looking at spray patterns from helicopters since those are already used for this application and have been for over sixty years. UAVs will be a great asset for mapping, collecting field data, and making applications to small crops, but it will just be another small tool, and is not the end all solution for precision ag.
during the chlorination phase of water treatment,
But we only drink Kool-Aid around here. Who gives a shit about the drinking water?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I came across a few articles today that were "of interest to you". I read them, and inevitably, I scrolled to the comments.
Maybe I'm just intentionally naive, but some of the things people are willing to say to complete strangers online are absolutely appalling. I'm sure that I am as guilty as anyone at one point or another, but that's beside the point.
If anything, the Internet revolution that will be reflected upon in 100 years will be known as the time when we really began to discover the evils of the human soul.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
UC Davis spokesman, Mr Wesp Rays Tudents, clarified that using campus policeman to spray on protesting students sitting on the side walk provoked too many protests and parodies. They believe the urban remote controlled helicopter would be a more humane approach and protect the identity of the policeman doing the spraying.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact