It is well accepted that drones are going to be a big part of agriculture from here on out. There are many options on the market for farmers looking to make use of drone technology to monitor crop health. Foremost among these is Skycision, creators of a software program to allow drones to collect multispectral imagery of farm fields. I had a chance to talk with Brendan Carroll, founder of Skycision, to learn more about what exactly it is they offer, and what makes them leaders of their, ahem, field.
Tell us a little about yourself and your background. How did you get into drones?
My background was as an IT Advisory Consultant for a Big 4 Firm, Ernst & Young, where I worked over a number of large corporate accounts, and I eventually transitioned into a career working for a large Investment Bank in New York, Credit Suisse. Amidst my work in the Financial Services industry, I had gone back to school for my Masters at Carnegie Mellon, the #1 ranked Information Systems program in the country.
My degree at CMU had strong core competencies in Data Analytics, and in my final semester I took a course in Entrepreneurship for High Growth companies taught by a local VC. At the time, there was a lot of buzz in the air about the capability for Amazon to leverage drones in delivery capacity. Intrigued, I began exploring drone delivery for pharmaceutical products to rural customers that did not have access to amenities so many enjoy in the city, and quickly became completely absorbed with the potential of drones for commercial applications in the enterprise.
The idea was ahead of its time and was a logistics nightmare at that point in time. However, in the customer discovery process, many of the people we spoke with were farmers. We realized they had bigger problems that included losing crop yield to undetected threats, environmental regulations that were strictly enforced, and antiquated software systems. I knew the application for drones in rural America was not within pharmaceutical delivery, but within aerial monitoring for the agriculture industry.
The pivot commenced, the genesis of Skycision was had, and we’ve been working at helping our farmers ever since.
Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.
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