Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Commons^™

Assessing The Use Of Lidar And Uav Technology For Monitoring Growing Alfalfa, Stuart Tucker Sheffield

Theses and Dissertations--Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering

Alfalfa is a popularly grown crop because of its value as a nutritious feed source for livestock. The efficient production of an alfalfa crop relies on the monitoring of certain parameters, like height, quality, and yield. Traditionally, producers have used manual measurements of alfalfa plant height to estimate the nutritive quality and yield of a growing alfalfa crop. Manual measurements of plant height are often labor intensive and provide low resolution data that is not acceptable for full field scale assessment of growing alfalfa. The two studies presented in this thesis offer detailed insight into the rapid and accurate monitoring …