Drones in Agriculture: A Look at What's Ahead
David Plummer: In Season 3, Aerial Influence is talking about DJI drones and the agricultural world specifically. In each episode, we're going to touch on different topics, from the different drones they use to the way they work together, but today we just wanted to review in general. Michael, I know you specifically had been the one spearheading the agriculture side for us. In terms of doing the research, finding out about the laws, finding out the legalities — can we spray? What can we do? How do you feel about the future of drones and where things are headed right now?
Michael Ferguson: It's definitely been a little slow up until now because it's not just about getting your 107. You've got to get your 107. You have to also get what’s called a 137, which is like an aerial applicator operating certificate. Then in addition to that, if you're going to be doing restricted use pesticides then you have to get the pesticide license. So there are three things. Now, not everybody gets all three. Usually, you've got a crop duster — he's just flying. Then you've got somebody that's mixing the tank for them; so he's the pesticide guy. Then obviously, with manned aviation, you don't need the remote pilot, but you need a pilot's license. We're not growers, we're drone guys, but we wanted to go through the process so we knew exactly how it would work for a client of ours. We wanted to get the 137. Obviously we had our 107 license for the remote — the pilot's license. Then we also needed to get some training on pesticides. Now we understand how to go about this legally, and we can also offer the drones; we can talk about the software. Basically we’ve put together an ecosystem — so it's another broad tool that can be used on the farm or wherever.
David Plummer: The idea of this podcast series is a brief overview, then, in each episode, we're going to talk a little bit more specifically. In one of the future episodes, we'll talk about that 137 — what it takes to get it, what it takes to get that aerial applicators license. But, at least the way I feel about it is, in the agricultural world, they’ve been trying to push drones for a long, long time. A lot of the farmers out there got a little bit leery of it, as if there’s all this promise of what it could do. Now, I think we’re finally at that point where it really could be making a big push forward into the future in a way that is going to make farming more economical for a lot more people, and hopefully can help save much of the farming community because they are struggling just as much as everybody else is right now, if not more. I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities in the future for sure, and it'll be interesting to see how Aerial Influence plays a role in that because there are not a lot of companies out there right now that are doing what we're doing.
Michael Ferguson: It started off where you were using a regular drone, basically an eye in the sky, to do crop scouting. And then we got clients that are in crop insurance; then it kind of bled into multi-spectral, so the cameras got better. But still there was nothing with really spraying or spreading. Now we’ve got the sprayers and the spreaders, but what do we put in it? The solution is different because you've got a plane with 500 gallons of solution; it's going to have a lot of water. There obviously has to be testing. There have to be people using this stuff. We're going to go over the whole ecosystem. We're going to talk about planning and mapping with the Phantom 4 RTK and the Phantom 4 Multispectral. We're going to use Ground Station Pro — that's the iPad app — to plan the maps. Once we have acquired the images, we're then going to take it into Terra and then we'll kind of show all the things that you can do with Terra. With Terra you can actually plan out where you're going to spray, but you can also take those multi-spectral images and you can analyze those to see.
David Plummer: I think that's an interesting thing because we can give people lots of information from these drones, especially from a multi-spectral, but what are they going to do with that information is the big question? We'll get into a little bit of that in some future episodes, so thank you guys so much for checking it out. We’ve got more episodes to come, and we're talking drones in the world of agriculture. I'm David, this is Michael, and we’re Aerial Influence. We'll see you next time.