Derry Area to teach students use of advanced drones to analyze agricultural acreage

A Westmoreland County school district is doubling down on using drones for its agriculture and horticulture program.

Derry Area already has a drone that students use to gather data during flyovers of farmland, and it plans to buy a second one.

“You can look from above the Earth at areas where there may be some deficiencies in crops, and then you can do a closer inspection through soil biopsies,” Assistant Superintendent Casey Long said.

“The whole premise is to increase the harvest for a growing population.”

Instructor Carly Rippole is planning to make the drones available to about 50 of her students in courses including plant science, landscape and design, and natural resources and ecology.

She said some students already have experience in piloting drones. Last spring, Derry Area hosted a drone workshop for students from throughout Westmoreland County in partnership with the Private Industry Council of Westmoreland/Fayette Inc.

But Derry Area’s specialized drones are of a different order. They’re equipped with a more advanced camera and sensors that can detect and render into images factors such as soil moisture, temperature and slope, while also counting the number of cows that are out to pasture or the number of trees in a forested acre, according to Rippole.

One of Rippole’s past assignments for her plant science students was to analyze turf grass in the high school football stadium.

“We did core samples and sent them to Penn State; it was a two-month process,” she said. Now, with the drones, she added, “We could just snap a couple of pictures and be able to get a lot of information.”

Given their capabilities, the drones each cost $10,000 or more. The district obtained its first drone through state funding and recently was awarded money for purchase of the second through the United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania’s STEM School Champions program.

Before the school’s drone program can take off, Rippole will need to complete training on how to operate the devices — a skill she will share with students.

She said students likely will pilot the drones over 5 acres near Derry Area’s Grandview Elementary, where they have long been able to observe local farmer Roger Frye planting and harvesting corn and soybeans in cooperation with the district.

Eventually, Rippole said, students may offer drone services to area farmers as part of a required supervised agricultural experience.

“We could take it into the community to help farmers and other agricultural businesses, to provide a report for them that they normally wouldn’t have,” she said.

Frye has about 400 animals on his Derry Township dairy farm and grows the crops to support them. He said a drone service is “the up-and-coming thing. It’s something we have to be able to put in our toolbox to use down the road.

“It can scout a field and tell us where we have issues with weed control that wasn’t handled properly. Then we can go back in and spot-spray it.”

Long said: “Maybe a farmer is having water issues or wants to know the success rate of their fertilizer. The drone can provide real-time information to our farmers in a fraction of the time it typically would take them.

“It could drastically impact their harvest and lead to greater revenue and feed more people.”