For most farmers, it’s all about the ground: What to plant in it, how much to irrigate it and how to tend it to generate the most bountiful yield. But at this week’s 2016 World Ag Expo, many farmers were looking to the sky. More precisely, they were looking at the booths with vendors selling drones to fly over ranches and farmland to perform a variety of tasks, from scanning crops with infrared cameras to spotting stray cattle at night to creating three-dimensional maps. And the vendors noted that there were more of them here than there were just a few years ago, as drone technology has improve and their the uses have increased, leading to more interest in the small, unmanned helicopter-type and fixed wing aircraft. Robert Ferrier, a Lindsay orange grower, were among the attendees on Thursday, the final day of the annual “Farm Show,” who stopped to look at the many drones on display. He bought his first, relatively inexpensive drone about a year ago to fly for fun, and a year later he bought cameras to mount on it to provide aerial views of his grove. “The main thing we […]

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