USDA ARS Researchers Creating Drones to ID Glyphosate Resistance

Researchers at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service are developing drones with cameras they say can identify weeds that resistant to glyphosate.

Engineer Yanbo Huang said one such weed is Palmer Amaranth.

“They call it pigweed. It finds its way into the soybean fields, corn fields, a lot of them. Many of the pigweeds have glyphosate resistance so how can we deal with it.”

Huang and his colleagues have worked on developing special cameras that they say can attach to drones who can fly low over fields.

“We can differentiate which ones are resistant and which ones are not. It’s 80 percent to 90 percent [accurate] so we can do that in the lab and in the field.”

The data can then be uploaded and processed much faster than a human could do it.