Drones are becoming increasingly useful for Victorian farmers from all sectors, with increased interest in the various use of the technology.
But it will still take some time before it is taken up throughout Victoria.
Chief pilot for drone manufacturer Falcon UAV Phil Lyons said more models were becoming available for agricultural use.
He said there was interest in multi-rotor models with a vertical take-off and landing format and four engines, which were demonstrated at the Seymour Alternative Farming Expo.
Fixed-wing drones that are shaped and flown similarly to a plane are proving to be beneficial.
"More than anything drones cover big areas that you physically can't cover yourself, and there are models that carry a variety of cameras and sensors," he said.
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Mr Lyons said that utilising Normalised Differential Vegetative Index (NDVI) technology, which picks up an amount of near-infrared that plants are reflecting, can significantly change how the industry works.
"NDVI can pinpoint anything that is under stress in grass, pasture, vineyards and even trees and look at what the problem is", he said
"We can go into those areas, get soil samples and find out where the soil is deficient, why it is affecting the plants, and we have a range of chemicals that can be applied to those specific areas to fix that description.
"It's like an analogy where people used to perform with a Stanley knife, now they can operate with a scalpel."
He also said more farmers were becoming aware of drones and their benefits to the agricultural sector.
"When I started the company nine years ago, people would come up to me at a farm field, and one in ten people would be aware of NDVI imaging, today that would have changed to about five in about ten would be familiar with the technology," he said.
"That technology is a starting point to see plant stress that the human eye can't detect... which is useful for cattle or sheep in where nutrition is critical to the health of the animal, and similarly for anyone who is cropping, we can see where we need to fix with specific prescriptions."
But some developments were still needed for farmers who want drones to do specific tasks, like herding cattle.
"To herd cattle with drones, you need to be a skilled pilot so that you can zip back and forth a metre above the ground," Mr Lyons said.
Mr Lyons also said there were ongoing developments to use drones to scare birds away from crops via fixed noise-generating devices.
In the Wimmera, cropping farmer Marty Colbert, Nhill, has been using drone technology to define topography in his paddocks for nearly seven years.
He said continued improvements to drone technology are proving to be hugely beneficial and that drones were now crucial to his soil mapping which in turn determines what soil samples he needs to use each year.
But he also believed there would be a lot of time before drone adaption is widely used among farms, as each operation is different, and farmers try to find time to learn about how to use the technology.
"Farmers are flat out doing their duties, and doing that well takes time," he said.
"You've got a lot of conscientious farmers trying to get everything else right.
"They are also smart enough to know that they should use a drone, but also smart enough to know that to have a drone, they must know how to use one properly."
A market for outsourced drone work did exist but it is currently working at a small scale in Victoria, according to Mr Colbert.
"A lot of farmers get a consultant, and a few random samples here and there from them, but the result from a random approach to soil tasting is you get a random result, which you can't use that in data-driven decision making," he said
"And if your data is not good, well, your decisions aren't going to be better."
