Deveron UAS, a drone company focused on aerial data-driven smart farming, has acquired Veritas Farm Management to expand its analytics resources and improve its unmanned agricultural services in North America. According to the press release, the agreement will allow farmers to access Deveron’s drone data network and make more informed decisions, thereby cutting costs and increasing farmland yields.
We’ve reported on drones in agriculture many times before, and in the past few years, unmanned aerial systems have provided farmers and ranchers across the world with previously unavailable or expensive data that can now simultaneously allow business owners to reduce the unnecessary expenditure of resources and let them more carefully plan for the future of a given area.
For Brazilian farmers, that means using photogrammetry to analyze crops. Japan’s aging farmers, on the other hand, have taken advantage of reducing manual labor by implementing herbicide-spraying drones. As for Deveron’s acquisition of Veritas Farm Management, the focus is on decreasing costs and maximizing yields by collating the data and customer base of both companies in the U.S. and Canada.
“Data, analytics and insights have always been the driving factor of our vision in building Deveron as a leading drone data company in North America,” said Deveron president and CEO David MacMillan. “Veritas has built an insights business deeply rooted in understanding the needs of farmers and what can be implemented on the farm today.”
Veritas, which provides farmers with large-scale businesses and precision agriculture services with informative data analytics, was primarily founded to help Canada’s farmers be more efficient by taking advantage of modern-day technology and easily available data.
“Veritas was born out of the need for better management tools for Ontario farmers,” said Aaron Bremer, business manager for Veritas. “Drone imagery has become one of the tools that allows for better management decisions. This partnership will enable Veritas to continue to develop and deliver measurable solutions to our current and growing geographical footprint of customers, in a way that is easy for farmers to implement.”
The partnership between farmers using conventional methods to do their work and data corporations focused on garnering actionable information means drone companies with professional pilot networks and functional post-processing software will only continue to grow in its appeal. For instance, we’ve seen drone surveys of farmland in the winter that are invaluable, with top of the line hobby drone companies like Parrot focused squarely on agriculture.