Drones used for agriculture are seeing a significant increase in Michigan after they became legal for spraying fields about four years ago in the state, according to Michigan State University Extension grape specialist and spray drones researcher Michael Reinke.
People started using them for their precision capabilities, meaning that drones can fly to a specific location where there’s a problem and spray pesticide on just those few acres instead of the whole field, Reinke said.
For a regular consumer, he said, it means a potential decrease in prices on farm-grown products.
“You are reducing time,” Reinke said. “You're reducing pesticide use and you're reducing cost in that particular example.”
Bryan Hammis is a co-founder of Flying Acres LLC that offers drone spraying services and Flying Acres Ag that sells drones and teaches how to use them.
He opened his first business about three years ago and said since then his company had 60 to 80 different customers and sprayed nearly 60,000 acres.
“When we first announced our company ... we heard time and time again that our idea of what we were doing was going to be a concept, not a career,” Hammis said. “We have taken the last three years plus of hard work ... to prove that drones have the capabilities and the technology to provide the application to the highest of standards.”
Drones in agriculture can be used for a variety of things such as shading greenhouses, feeding fish and pasture spraying. But Hammis said his company uses drones to apply pesticides for specialty crops such as potatoes, strawberries, pumpkins and cucumbers.
Specifically, a quick uptake in drones is centered around two major crops – corn and potatoes, Reinke said.
Montcalm County, where Hammis’s business is located, is the largest potato producer in Michigan, according to MSU. And Michigan is the nation’s leader in producing potatoes for chips.
When it comes to spraying crops, Hammis said a drone’s advantage is that it’s in the air and it reduces a chance to spread disease.
“Especially in potatoes, if you have an outbreak of late blight or something like that, and you go through the field ... if your tires are going through the field, that disease, that pathogen can get on the tires,” he said. “We land on top of our trailer. We actually never even touched the ground.”
Reinke added that drone’s ability to be in the air also means less damage to the crops.
“Say you've had a really big rain and so you can't get out there because you would cause ruts and damage to the soil in the field when a drone can just fly straight out there and do what it needs to do without damaging the field,” he said.
Challenges and opportunities in the future
But drones are still a new and developing technology, which means they pose some challenges.
One of the biggest challenges, Reinke said, is learning how to use them and getting comfortable with them.
“Drones are complex spray systems,” he said. “They have lots of settings that you can adjust to really dial in and do a really good spray or good application. But the problem is you have to know how to use it correctly. You need that knowledge to know how to make those adjustments.”
Another issue is keeping up with the new capabilities that drones gain because their development is moving at a quick pace.
“If the state of your knowledge is two years old, that’s out of date,” Reinke said. “We have a new generation of capabilities every year coming out.”
But Reinke sees opportunities in these challenges. He said this new technology can bring back the interest of the young generation to pursue a career in farming in the near future.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture data, the average age of a farmer is 57 years old. Farmers under the age of 35 account for 9% of all farmers in the country.
“Most farms, it's a family affair. If it’s an older farmer, they generally have a son or daughter or even a grandson or granddaughter that is working on the farm,” Reinke said. “To bring them in and get them excited about farming, drones can do a great job at that.”
However, in most cases farmers don’t have to be the ones who use the drone applicator, Reinke said. It’s mostly companies that offer their services to come and spray a farmer’s field. They’s also known as custom applicators, and Hammis’s Flying Acres LLC is one of them.
When it comes to the future opportunities in drone application, Hammis said he’s optimistic as well. He envisions that soon each section of fields will have its own drone, and farmers will be able to operate them from their computer.
“We are very, very excited to what it holds for us, and we're excited to be part of it and to help others get into the industry and start their own application companies or have a drone on their farm that they can utilize,” he said.
Similarly, Reinke said he believes people will only be adding new capabilities to drones and using them for fruit crops, ornamentals and large landscaping.
“I see it incorporating more into farming,” he said. “I do not see them replacing other sprayers. I see them being used as a high precision tool to add capabilities to farmers, and as farmers get more comfortable with them, we will see increased usage.”
