Adapting to GPS and  Digital Monitoring

Adapting to GPS and Digital Monitoring

Susan Allen
Susan Allen
I'm Susan Allen, Welcome to Today's Fruit Grower Report. Like grape growers tree fruit farmers are intimately involved with monitoring their trees on site. It's a very hands on occupation but with the packing industry rapidly adapting to digital imagery in the foreseeable future tree farming might become a routine desk job. GPS and digital monitoring have been more difficult for tree fruit growers to adapt to by the fact that unlike wheat or soy farmers, they are not growing an annual crop. A tree is a fixed unit and data collection regarding soil and moisture often is analyzed over years not seasons.

Drones can now provide imagery of issues like orchard stress, diseases and even sprinklers that aren't working properly. Dr. Dave Brown, Assoc. Professor of Soil Science, Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, Washington State University shared with a group of growers what their day might look like shortly.

Brown: A lot of the operations in the mid-west the grower actually sits on his computer and every piece of equipment has a GPS or radio transmitter, and they are watching everything in 20 different fields and every day every hour they have got it all, they see it all and that software manages it pretty much real time, so you really need the software interface that process that data that gives you those maps that allow you to act right away rather than having to sort it all out yourself and make something out of it.

For orchardists, the digital imaging will only be beneficial if data is interpreted far enough in advance to be ahead of the problem, a reason many growers have to invest in technology that changes by the day. I'm Susan Allen for the Fruit Grower Report

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