Some More Keys To The Kingdom "Escape" To The Real World
As you know I’m a great believer in distributing technology to the places where it can be used most. I spent a lot of my life working for the government and working with large corporations who sometimes spend more time trying to protect “secrets” and “intellectual property” than they do innovating or accomplishing anything. I also am not much of a fan of the class of folks in formal education who devise methods to make it harder for “ordinary folk” to use technology … such as the push over the last few years to make GIS and GPS “special practitioner” qualifications and try to take technology originated for the public good and move it farther and farther away from the public.
One of the technologies that has been beyond the reach of many has been “overhead imagery”, sort of a catchall phase that covers the collecting of information by flying over an area of the ground and collecting images via sensors … most familiarly, the sensor is a camera and the imagery produced is pictures of use to the human eye.
Among others, Google has brilliantly moved the world of useable, human-interpretable imagery out of the back room with their fabulous Google Maps and Google Earth. Although many people call this imagery by the generic term “satellite”, the great majority is collected by aircraft carrying special cameras and flying precise patterns over specific areas.
Aerial photogrammetery (mapping) has always been and expensive and time consuming process. The equipment carried in the aircraft is expensive and the aircraft typically have to be expensively modified to carry it. Pilots also have to have special training to be able to do the precision aspects of the necessary flying. Back “in the day” when I was working GIS mapping projects for the USAF we frequently had to make do with outdated imagery because there was no funding to survey areas of interest on a frequent enough basis.
One of my pet peeves is how many people in the US who are all benefiting from a strong agricultural economy seldom even realize how important farming is and how much farming and ranching contributes to the economy. One of the oldest names in agriculture, John Deere has now “unlocked” many of the secrets of precision aerial mapping. With a simple “strap on” camera pod (that’s the white bullet shape in the lower right, any economical rental Cessna can be a camera platform and any normally qualified pilot can follow the GPS/computer generated cockpit display to do the precision patterns required. Fascinating use of technology and overnight another whole mysterious set of “secret key holders” now find that ordinary mortals can do what was before their secret skills.
The way they are using this system is fascinating in itself, read the full write-up in Farm and Ranch Guide here. Bonus trivia question … as most of you know or could guess, the John Deere company is named after its founder, ag inventor John Deere. For a free one year subscription to this blog, leave me a comment and tell me how many internal combustion tractors John Deere ever saw in his lifetime? (hint … you _can_ give a definitive answer). Tune in tomorrow for the answer.