Dispelling Drone Myths: Who's buying agricultural drones?
David: Hey everybody, welcome to the Aerial Influence blog. Thank you so much for checking in. I'm David Plummer along with Michael Ferguson. We are Aerial Influence.
Today's blog is number two of our series, Dispelling Drone Myths, “Who's buying agricultural drones?” That's what people want to know. They see these giant drones that are flying and who is actually buying them? And Michael, I know you have a story about one of our clients.
Michael: Yeah, it's a great story! This couple has been farming since the 60s and they have about 650 acres. They were interested in the Agras and also an Enterprise Zoom for crop scouting. But this is a couple that has been farming, like I said, since the 60s. One of the things they said is it keeps them young. Which I think is great because, well, when we went and saw them they've got a better iPad than we do. They're savvy as hell, which is great. They want to use the Agras for spring spot spraying, and for spreading cover crops. They also get a particular beetle that’s infested their trees. So, they want to go up 50 feet and do a little bit of spray there. We're currently going through the process of helping them get their 107.
David: So, I think that's an important thing that people probably don't know is that these big spraying agricultural drones, you can't just buy one and go fly it. You've got to have your 107 license, which you'd have to have if you were doing aerial photography for real estate. Anything you're making money at, if you're using a drone to do it, you have to have your 107 license. It is basically like a driver's license test. It's a 60 question test you have to study for. But to be able to spray dangerous goods or toxic material from a drone, you have to have something called a 137 waiver. Correct?
Michael: Exemption. And then, on the 107 side it says you cannot carry hazardous material or dispense hazardous material. Which restricted-use pesticides are, really any pesticide is seen as such. So you're getting an exemption on the 107 side as well. So anyway, that's where we come in because we help not just with the drone and how it flies, you know, lots of people can do that, but putting it all together for them so they can go out and do the mission or job that they want to do.
David: Time after time. Right.
Michael: And they're there, they know what they're doing, they're legal, all the things are kind of set in place.
David: So the answer to the question that we started with, which was, who is actually buying agricultural drones? It's people that are trying to figure out ways to cover small amounts of ground. So obviously 650 acres that's not a small amount of ground, but they're using it to lay cover crops, spot spray, that sort of thing. Folks like that, it's saving them money and saving them time. They're not having to use as much pesticide because they're spraying only the portions of the field that need to be sprayed. Other people that are buying them are people that want a multispectral drone, like the Phantom 4 multispectral, which is literally going to be able to tell you the health of your field. So you can fly a drone and say, “Hey, over here we’ve got some irregularities and we need to go check that out.” Then you can figure out what needs to be sprayed, and what you need to spray over there. Instead of covering an entire field with pesticide, you're just covering that one specific area.
Michael: Right. And you can basically see that over time. I mean there's just so many things that you could utilize a drone for on the farm.
David: Even for field scouting like you said, they're using a DJI Enterprise Zoom just for field scouting. So, think of sitting on your front porch, but you're able to check your back five acres without ever having to walk out into the field. That's a pretty great thing, and so lots of people are interested in buying drones.
Michael: If you got the geese that are constantly picking at the yard and messing with things and Sparky's getting a little bit old, you can use the speaker on the Enterprise Mavic for a bird dog and get those geese off your property humanely. It's just kind of like the same tactic as a barking dog. This thing is just more like a barking drone.
David: Drones are our future and we want to be here as a resource for you. So subscribe to our emails to get the latest drone knowledge.
Michael: As always, thank you for reading. We're excited to share the future of drones with you.