On January 31, 2014 the UAV Team teams up with some members from MESA Lab Ph.D. students Brendan Smith, Brandon Stark, and Tiebiao Zhao on their first field trip to visit John Monnich, current owner of Silkwood Wines.
Together they visited the vineyard and learned the importance UAV’s could potentially have in agriculture.
Viridiana Navarro, a first year Environmental Engineer on the UAV Team describes her experience after seeing a UAV being flown around John’s vineyard, “It’s amazing how such a little machine could really benefit agriculture in the future.Being raised in the Central Valley and knowing our community can use these in the near future astonishes me as to how much progress we have made.It has been an honor to meet with John and I’m very glad I get to be apart of bringing agriculture and technology into one.”
John hopes more research goes into UAV’s in order to provide aerial images of his vineyard to further identify and prevent any possible problems with his vineyard.
UAV’s have been known to benefit agriculture in a sense that they are able to collect accurate georeferenced data to infer possible crop stresses, future research for UAV’s is growing! So stay tuned!
