Agricultural drone use soars among NZ contractors
Use of agricultural drones by contractors in New Zealand is soaring.
Designed by a contractor’s son, in conjunction with a software developer, the original version offered field mapping and basic job recording.
It has since developed into a means of correlating hours worked and job details, alongside GPS directions to job sites.
A key feature of the app is the recording of job sheets on a smartphone, rather than via the machine’s regular telematics software. This means operators can move between a mixed fleet of tractors and machines, but manage their time on one platform.
Contractors who might visit multiple farms in a single day can use the app to record the time spent on each job and record the quantity of consumables to create accurate and easily understood invoices.
As well as eliminating the paper trail for workers required to record hours, the system works in real-time – no need to visit an office at the end of a day.
In operation, when entering a new paddock, the user presses Start, then a recording function stores all movements and collates items such as time worked, the vehicle or implement, job notes, seed rates or numbers of bales produced.
All jobs can be used with a geo-note, a specific location on a map, meaning paddocks do not need to be mapped before work commences.
A management suite within the app allows those in charge to see when a job is started, completed or interrupted – great for monitoring staff who are working alone.
The app also allows jobs to be queued, so the operator knows where they are heading to next and can see notes specific to each job – such as “leave headland if conditions are wet.”
Additional features like directing first-time visitors to the correct paddock using GPS will help eliminate mistakes, with said paddock being clearly marked in colour. The app also stores the point of contact details for a job so they don’t have to be stored on an individual’s mobile phone.
Location pins are “dropped” every ten minutes, so managers can keep track of a job as it progresses, then when it is completed and signed off, details can be sent to an accounting package to raise invoices as the operator leaves the paddock.
Available for iOS and Android Systems, HarvestYield is available via the usual app stores.
