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The Virginia Tech Tidewater AREC in Holland is currently hosting international visitors for a drone school event, which began March 25 and will run through April 30. 

Six visitors from the African countries of Ghana, Malawi, Senegal, and Uganda are on-site to learn how to use drones and aerial imaging under the instruction of Abhilash Chandel, a precision agricultural specialist. Their goal is to utilize precision agricultural technology to select peanut varieties with improved resistance to diseases specific to their countries and drought and heat tolerance for better yield in their environments.

The drone school is made possible by a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) project funded through the Feed the Future Peanut Innovation Lab. 

Maria Balota, a crop physiologist, is the Principal Investigator (PI) on this project, which focuses on the development of high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) tools for field selection of peanut disease, drought, and variety performance. To learn more about the project, please visit the group’s Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/TidewaterAREC.