The Department of Agriculture and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) are drumming up funding support as they push to escalate the “game of drones” with a team of at least two dozen experts in drone technology ready for deployment across the archipelago.
This initiative is meant to help farmers prepare for and address climate-related calamities including those involving floods and the ongoing El Niño.
In a statement, the FAO said the move was part of a pilot phase of “the still-fledgling project” that kicked off in March, with two drones flying over provinces that were considered among those worst affected by the El Niño weather phenomenon.
For this drone project, the DA is seeking budget allocation while the FAO is calling on international donors to help expand the use—here and elsewhere around the world—of this “new tool for countries at risk from natural disasters.”
The United Nations agency said about 25 FAO and government technical experts were ready to be deployed across the Philippines to support drone missions, having recently trained for more than three weeks on how to fly the drones and use a range of remote aerial assessment methods.
Christopher Morales, director of the DA’s field operations service, said initial missions involved flights over the provinces of Capiz in the Visayas as well as Maguindanao and Cotabato in Mindanao.
Morales said the drones, which were capable of covering up to 600 hectares a day, promised better results in predicting disasters as well as assessing damage in calamity-hit areas.
“This is more scientific than the usual method of having our field operations staff personally go to the affected areas, with data that need further verification because they may be overstated or understated,” he said.
The FAO describes the drones as being equipped with equipment that can produce detailed and data-rich maps from aerial photographs.
The data gathered can be used to see which agricultural areas are at risk from natural disasters, and identify ways through which such risks can be countered.
“Additionally, imagery generated from drone flights can reveal where agricultural infrastructure projects and service facilities like irrigation or storage facilities could be sited to best serve local farmers,” said Jose Luiz Fernandez, FAO representative in the Philippines. “The technology can also potentially support in the assessment of coastal and forest areas.”
Fernandez earlier urged the Philippine government to “increase its investment in this cost-effective technology” so that more regions of the country can be covered at the soonest possible time.”
According to Morales, typhoon-prone areas may have better prospects both before and after bad weather strikes “if government investments (in these drones) will come.”
“One to two days before (a typhoon’s) landfall, we can have pre-disaster risk assessment and plan for appropriate response (when the typhoon has passed),” Morales said.
Preparing for a disaster in such a manner can greatly reduce damage and avoid the need to build agriculture back from scratch following a calamity, he said.
The engineer added that the DA was also now working with a private company that was designing a prototype of a drone that can be used in cloud-seeding operations.
“If we can have such a drone, then that also means helping save lives considering that (early on during this current El Niño) we suffered a plane crash that killed two of our colleagues,” Morales said.