Mapping Plants with Drones

Over the past year we’ve been playing a lot with drones.

Using drones, or Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) as they are often called, in the field of agriculture has proven to be quite a useful tool for people who grow plants.

Drones can be used for creating video and still photos, for 3D modeling, mapping, inspection, landscape planning and design, survey work, creating virtual tours, project documentation, tree and plant counting, crop assessment and more.

We’ve been flying and then coming back and testing online software tools that will do all of those things with the data that is collected during flight.

Some of us are not only plant geeks, but just regular geeks too.

Plants Map’s CTO, Chris Muldrow, Allen Schmidt and I have been working together for over 20 years. In our early careers we were pioneering in the online real estate space creating virtual tours of houses and properties for sale before you could really even get those posted online. (There was no YouTube back then!)

Allen and I have also been flying RC aircraft as a serious hobby for more than a decade.

We have been asked many times if we could use our drone or one of our planes to shoot video of land, tree farms, arboretums and even a timber forest!

We’ve done some of that but up until now it has all been what I call “charity work” because it is currently illegal to fly a drone for commercial purposes unless you have an official FAA pilot’s certificate.

Well, now we have a “Part 107” certificate and we’re official!

We’re going to be launching a section of our blog on the topic of drones and specifically as it relates to people with plants.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be posting samples of the types of products that we can produce and we’ll also be writing a lot of general articles about using drones in the horticulture space and for agriculture as well as for building promotional websites to promote garden tourism.

As we begin to ramp up this new line of business, please contact us with questions.

The coolest part is that Plants Map works great as a name for a company that can fly drones to photograph and map plants!