China has urged Zimbabwe to adopt use of drones in the agriculture sector to bring more efficiency and maximum productivity.
The inception of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) popularly known as Drones, is bringing about a paradigm shift in both the artificial intelligence and agricultural sector. These drones are flying robots that can be remotely controlled or fly autonomously through software-controlled flight plans in their embedded systems, working seamlessly with on-board sensors and Global Positioning System (GPS).
Justin Gong, Vice President from XAG, a global agriculture automation company, said they are using 3,000 crop dusting drones in the cotton rich Xinjiang province in China.
“Zimbabwe can benefit heavily on the use of drones since they can access areas that manual farming machinery can’t. As they spray from above, the drones avoid crushing crops, unlike tractors and humans, while doing the same job. Considering that Zimbabwe is a huge exporter of tobacco and other crops in Africa’s SADC region, the country can maximize its productivity by integrating the use of drones for agriculture in its various farming activities” added the XAG Vice President.
Zimbabwe’s farmers can benefit significantly by replacing manual farming with machinery as drones can cover 40 times the area a human would be able to spray in a single day.
Drones are being used to spray cotton fields with pesticide in Xinjiang, China, covering an area of more than 4,000 square kilometers.
Taking into consideration of government’s massive efforts in increasing productivity through the command agriculture program, the nation can benefit heavily by adopting drones to increase efficiency in crop production.
