(TWN) - It's a big step forward for technology in agriculture. The FAA has issued an exception to the current ban on the commercial use of unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles, or drones.

The agency has approved the use of drones to monitor crops and survey farm fields. This means, growers can hire outside companies to use drones as a commercial service for crop monitoring and surveying purposes. By doing so, it will take hours, instead of days to conduct certain studies.

Scheid Vineyards in Greenfield, CA has already been testing these drones.

"We train our pesticide control advisors, we train our irrigators. We can go out with this and search the whole block and then we can go back and find some trouble areas send that scout to those areas identify it and maybe we find out only 5% of the block is infected and we only have to spray 5% of the block," Greg Gonzalez, from Scheid Vineyard Technologies, said.

Farmers say, the benefit is that they can catch any vineyard farmers say, the benefit is that they can catch any vineyard disease or threats to prevent loss of production. This could save them billions of dollars.

OTHER BENEFITS OF DRONES

•     Searching places that aren't safe for humans, such as looking for survivors in collapsed buildings after an earthquake or inspecting nuclear power plants following a meltdown.
•     Helping firefighters battling forest blazes by watching where flames are popping up without risking lives. Helicopters often can't be used because their powerful rotors threaten to spread the fire.
•     Helping scientists conduct research inside volcanic ash clouds, hurricanes, tornadoes or other spots that are not safe for humans.
•     Inspecting icy, wind-swept chairlift towers at ski resorts, reducing employee risk and worker-compensation insurance costs.
•     Visually inspecting oil refinery flare stacks, tall towers used to burn off gas when pressure builds too much. The flares give off so much heat that people often can't stand on the ground below, let alone climb the tower unless there is a lengthy and costly production shut down.