Drones in Agriculture: What is DJI Terra?

David Plummer: Hi everyone, David Plummer and Michael Ferguson here from Aerial Influence. This is the third installment of our blog series. We are discussing drones and agriculture today, and this is a question we are asked often: What is DJI Terra? 

I think a lot of people who don't understand software or who don't understand mapping, may not really understand what DJI Terra is and what it does. Please give us a quick overview of it. I know there are other competitors out there, too but let's focus on DJI Terra. 

Michael Ferguson: DJI Terra is basically mapping software — stitching software — so you can take out a drone, Phantom 4 Multispectral or RTK, using either the built-in screen or a ground station pro (like the iPad app). You figure out where you want to make that map, then it will populate the lines as far as where it's going to take pictures. It sends it out on the mission and takes those pictures, then you take that back and if it's a remote that can plug right into a laptop, you can actually process Terra that way. Most of the time you use the SD card with your computer, and then process the map. It's what you can do afterwards that is unique. 

So if you're taking, let's say a Phantom 4 RTK, it's just going to be regular RGB images, and you're going to be making your map. From there, you can actually export that map to say, a T16 or an MG-1P spraying drone, and you can remove obstacles. So it goes around the barn and it goes around the big oak tree.

David Plummer: The stuff you don't want to spray.

Michael Ferguson: Exactly. Then it will then go on that path and spray, so there's a lot of different uses for it. You can do 2-D maps, you can do multispectral maps, you can do 3-D maps, thermals.

Then those can be exported to a client, or it could be exported to the agricultural platform where you can then save fields and have those sprayed or spread over and over again.

David Plummer: The infrastructure within DJI has a lot to offer on the agricultural side, but the overview of what Terra is essentially — it is a software that you're going to use when you have flown your 500 acre farm and captured an incredible amount of pictures. You will upload the image files to the software, and it's going to stitch all those photos together to make it one giant map. In its simplest form, that's what it does. 

After it stitches the map is where the magic happens. That's where it really is going to give you the information you’re going to need as a farmer — where the health of your plants are, where you need to water, where you need more pesticide. The beauty of it is it works with these bigger drones that we're going to talk about in another episode.

I do think that Terra has been a question mark for a lot of people when compared to Drone Deploy or Pix4D. Pix4D is mapping software that people, especially the police, are using.

Michael Ferguson: Yes, for things like accident reconstruction. 

David Plummer: The reason they're using these is because they’re not cloud-based. It's all processed on your computer. They don't like the cloud-based options. Then you’ve got Drone Deploy — that's a very popular one as well. 

Michael Ferguson: It works from anything from construction to agriculture as well. All those programs are great. We'd have to look into it a little bit more, but it looks like what you could do is you could have a DJI drone, definitely an RGB one — I'm specifically talking about the multispectral — being able to take those images and put it into a Pix4D or Drone Deploy. You can probably do that and maybe achieve a little bit more analysis, but what we're trying to review is really the DJI ecosystem. How do you identify a field, map that field, analyze that field, and then take that information, upload it into one of the spraying drones so that it knows where to spray or spread seed. That's what we're trying to accomplish. 

David Plummer: Right. So as you said, really complicated, but we're going to get into the things that most people are really excited about in our next episode. 

In Episode 4, we're going to be talking about the DJI Agras MG-1P and the DJI Agras T16. Those are the big boys, the big spraying drones. Thank you guys so much for checking out our blog. 

We are so excited about how drones can help your business or farm, so make sure to email us if you're interested in more information. 

Michael Ferguson: As always, thank you for listening. We're excited to share the future of drones with you.

Prefer to listen? Enjoy this episode as a podcast!

The infrastructure within DJI has a lot to offer when it comes to the agricultural side of things, but it can be a big topic. In this week's podcast we cover the basics of mapping software, and specifically the benefits of the DJI Terra mapping capabilities.

Michael Ferguson