Boy, has your past year gone by like mine? With all the changes in 2020, I can’t believe spring is right around the corner. Before we know it, we’ll be in the middle of summer. Along with that, now is the time to plan for the spring planting season.

We are honored to be involved in a few endeavors which will be pushing the edge of incorporating drones into the agricultural industry that will help with sustainability and bring more ROI to growers. We are teaming with the United Soybean Board to precisely geolocate the invasive Palmer Amaranth weed and then spot spray the weed. Parts of the technology are widely accepted within the agricultural industry, like scouting and broadcast spraying. However, there are other parts, like using artificial intelligence to identify the weed and spot spraying with a drone, which are at the leading edge of technology. In addition, the workflow from scouting, weed identification and geolocation and then passing weed geolocations to the spot sprayer need to be developed. The effort this year will focus on each of these workflow products individually, with a follow on effort where we’ll actively manage a field’s weed control. Any interested parties out there who would like to be involved? If so, please reach out.

As this technology is honed, it can be applied to other crops like corn, wheat, etc. Since current spray drones have a limited payload capacity compared to ground sprayers or crop dusters, spot spraying fits nicely into the drones niche while filling an agricultural gap. Adoption of this will reduce the grower’s cost while also contribute to a sustainable environment.

Our other endeavor is to help out a start up company, Hydropore, develop a hydrogen fuel cell as a drone energy source. The vast majority of today’s drones use batteries, however their energy to weight ratio is very low and only allow 20-40 minutes of flight time. This creates a gap to service a large number of acres for scouting or spraying missions. Using this technology greatly increase the drones flight time and payload capacity.

We are very excited to help our partners develop this technology while helping our American growers!