Drones are going to be a large part of agriculture, but the problem isn't the technology. Imo the technology is already at a point where it's useful enough for me to invest in. If i wanted to today i could buy what i need for scouting and spraying a ~1000h farm from aliexpress.
The problem is the regulatory environment on two fronts. First ( in Canada) the pesticides I'd like to use are not registered for drone application, even if they are registered for application from helicopter or plane.
Second, I don't have priority airspace rights. Which means I have to have a person watching both the drone and surrounding airspace for crop dusters or personal low flying aircraft. Even if I file a flight plan weeks ahead of time and a NOTAM [notice to all airmen] i am required to ground my drone if an aircraft with a person is nearby. Even if they have failed to file NOTAMs, which in the case of my local spray dudes is 100% of the time. This makes completing a scouting or spraying job more labour intensive than using a tractor because I often require a spotter at the far end of a field.
Until the regulatory issues are sorted out, and drones can be operated with Beyond Visual Line of Sight rules, you won't see massa adoption of this tech.
My drone fleet is sitting and collecting dust at the moment, which is a shame because they do provide valuable information.
In the US, at least, regulatory solutions happen when large commercial interests get behind them. Commercial agribusiness is extremely powerful, so the lack of regulatory clarity will presumably disappear the second that large businesses decide they need to deploy this tech.
Verizon owned a drone startup, they even participated in congressional hearings related to drones, yet they still couldn't extract bvlos waivers from the FAA for testing. How much bigger and influencial should a party be?
As a pilot, this has always been weird to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that people just don’t like drones. I think selling them to the masses is part of the answer.
I can build a tower (with exemptions for protected airspace) that’s 199ft in the US without any problem. To me, that basically says to any pilot “expect the unexpected if you fly lower than that,” which insanely low to aircraft (not helicopters) not near an airfield.
> 199ft in the US .. which insanely low to aircraft (not helicopters) not near an airfield.
Not to geophysical exploration pilots running gravity, radiometrics, magnetics, etc in modified crop dusters at 80m ground clearance and 70m/s.
199 ft ~= 60m which a survey line might bottom out at when draping over ridges, etc.
Literally millions and millions of line kilometres are flown at those specifications, entire countries (like Mali, Fiji, Australia, etc) have been covered at 200m line separation.
Insanely low for yourself is pretty much just another day in the cockpit in just another month long survey job for survey pilots.
Not to mention actual crop dusting and other STOL grunt work.
Those pilots are in the minority, and already accept a much higher level of risk. Also, drone flights that have been problematic are typically in congested areas (much like laser problems).
What might have been better is if the FAA had created a way for those pilots to create mini low-level TFRs or protected airspace to warn drone pilots not to fly their during inspections. It’s also worth mentioning that many survey jobs are being replaced by more advanced drones due to cost.
I do respect what you are saying, but having a foot on both sides of the fence can’t help but feel like the FAA had a knee-jerk reaction to drones.
If I fly a 600g drone below treetop level in a heavily forested, rural area, it will have 0 impact to aviation. This is currently illegal without licensing, additional hardware, or a flight notification. I find this silly.
In the light aircraft domain working survey and dusting aircraft ideally work all the daylight hours with pilots on shift to take over as daily flight hours pass personal limits.
The economics are such that the planes are always aloft, parked at night, or being maintained.
Air Transport companies price light passenger and mail runs on the basis of daily, perhaps twice daily A->B runs, Air Tractor companies price on the basis of 100,000 line kilometres jobs completed as rapidly as possible in order to move onto the next, there's a backlog of mineral exploration and agriculture work demanding more craft and pilots.
> and already accept a much higher level of risk.
I'm sorry, are you saying that makes it OK to add more risk to low level drafting by just allowing any old drone up in the air anywhere at all?
Until some form of comprehensive regulation is resolved and upheld with drone operators required to get clearance for airspaces it's still better to err on the side of human safety now.
Depends on the operator, K.Geophysics operated for 25+ years with 15+ airframes (mostly fixed wing, some heli's) with zero deaths or crashes.
Another company bought them out and had three major crashes and five deaths with the next two years.
You can put that down to quality of maintainance and route planning.
One crash due to engine failure on takeoff and climbing, a second due to tangling with power lines that were not on the flight plan, the third I'm unsure but IIRC it was maintainance again.
By cause these were crashes caused by poor support surrounding the work rather than intrinsic risk of low flying .. of which only the power line tangle had an element of, which wouldn't have happened had the support team down their homework.
In a fixed wing, altitude is absolutely your friend and gives you more options to land, which equates to a higher probability of finding a nicer emergency landing spot.
And to your point, power lines that are shorter than 199ft don’t have to be on the charts. I could erect a tower off major airways or near an airport to that height without prior warning.
I bet agriculture drones rarely need to fly more than 50 feet up. They probably spend the majority of their time around 5m. I doubt air traffic would be a big concern outside legal restrictions that might not be fine grained enough to know the difference
You're very knowledgeable, this is great. Is there any automated tech on the market you've seen to do the spotting for you, so you can dynamically ground drones as air conditions change? Also, are you piloting all these manually (yknow, if they weren't gathering dust), is it a preset flight plan, or are you already experimenting with AI control? Would think even an LLM fed with air traffic sensor data could make the call to ground drones and switch between flight plans dynamically at this point - though I'd want it thoroughly tested and airing on the side of caution always. Also - what kind of height do you require for drone dusting? Could you get away with keeping it low to the ground, dusting only a few plants at a time at the expense of longer flight time and battery charging, but at least hopefully practically low enough to skirt any potential collision and legal issues, and potentially still entirely automated? Would think that kind of specificity also allows for stuff like dusting individual crop areas differently according to need, too.
All just thoughts from a programmer here - very cool you get to experiment with this kind of stuff in a practical setting. Hope it gets more practical soon!
Automated spotting is a bit of a bandaid, but might prove more useful as this situation drags on. I've thought about those raspberry pi flight trackers, but I don't think you can get the data I'm looking for from from Mode C Transponders, which is what I assume the small guys use. I haven't looked into it too deeply. The optics needed for a visual system are daunting, (the area I need to watch is large, and planes are small and fast!) but might be possible. A radar solution might be possible as well.
Based on my understanding of the technology I don't think this is the right application for an LLM, but perhaps more traditional algorithm coupled with a modification of the right-of-way rules would do the trick.
The drones I fly for scouting are on various premade flight plans. DroneDeploy.com offers a good application for mapping fields from 300' high, and FlyLitchi.com works well for custom paths (flying to one spot in the field, dropping down low to take a high resolution picture of the crop, then zipping back up and repeating several times.) I can't see much benefit to full AI control of the aircraft. The current mode of operation has them on preset "rails" with room for adapting to obstacles using ultrasonic sensors. I'd like some visual adaption capabilities, perhaps something to do with lidar and SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping), but my drones don't have these sensors, and the last time I looked into this a DIY solution was out of my wheelhouse.
I've only seen water trials of spray drones, but my understanding is the lower the better, within reason. depending on the vortices the aircraft generates the spray booms need to be about 4-6' off the canopy top, so ~15' total flight height. You can find a little bit of an overview here: https://sprayers101.com/drone-sprayers-are-we-ready/
Fascinating. Thank you for answering that all - I will definitely be looking back at this post one day if and when I get to play with this stuff myself. Appreciate the site links especially
Sounds like a lot of legal overhead is mainly what's standing between drone spraying... 30-60 day delay between plan submission and operation, not easy to keep that practical. Though at least yeah - 15' seems like a much more manageable height - hopefully that would at least be underneath any neighboring aircraft
Fair on the LLM - always use traditional algorithms if available and with effort/time for such things. LLMs are just the convenient duct tape / superglue to throw at handling edge cases with some confidence they'll generally use common sense about it. Untrained intern equivalent which can be combined with the algorithms if they're brittle.
If the local spray pilots aren't filing their paperwork and presumably not getting in trouble, isn't it reasonable that no one would care if you did the same?
It sounds like no one is enforcing those rules/laws.
NOTAMs are largely optional especially for things like making cropdusting passes in uncontrolled areas.
In this context the local pilots aren't out of compliance with any rules. The regulatory issue is that for almost all purposes human piloted craft have priority over remotely piloted craft, and there isn't a good way, currently, to communicate with pilots in the area.
Believe it or not, there are parts of the US, rural areas especially, where it is perfectly legal to fly an airplane without a radio or any other electronics.
All of these ag planes are operating under VFR, they can see each-other, largely they don't need to talk to each other, and don't need to know what exactly every plane in the vicinity is doing. It doesn't seem like it should work, but midair collisions between planes just aren't very common.
For planes, not filing an optional NOTAM for routine work is about as risky as not getting a police escort vehicle to go buy groceries. If we start allowing RC/autonomous cars on the roadway that place other drivers at risk, we might start wanting to file our grocery buying plans so we don't die. Or we would just say that you can't drive your RC car on the road when other road users are present.
In 2010 I biked through a lot of Japanese countryside and saw quite a few drones (of the helicopter variety) spraying crops. They seemed human-controlled, but still, way ahead of their time.
The future of drones, especially in dense areas may require some sort of technological solution like that, but for the time being out in the boonies here I would love for the rules to change so that the first 300' or so of airspace above my property is "claimed."
How is that going to work with civil VFR aircraft, including helicopters? ADS-B Out still isn't even required in some classes of airspace. The notion of retrofitting every old R-22 with TCAS is ludicrous.
Was just thinking out loud, as a layman, along the lines of how not to wait for top down regulation, but still going around the practical problem of avoiding in both senses, the actual collision and the authorities eyes on you :)
I don't even know the acronyms you gave, going on a rabbit hunt now
This might be ripe for self-piloting drones. Let the human crop dusters fly in daylight. While the farmer programs the night mission. And the automatic drones take over at night.
Why is this a better idea than a pull behind sprayer that goes behind a tractor and dispenses crop spraying intelligently with AI when it recognizes pests?
Seems like a simpler system than using drones, which can fly about 20 mins max on one charge.
Deere offers that. They call it "See and Spray".[1]
Their marketing video is terrible. An ag equipment dealer has a better one.[2]
A neat demo is to fill the spray tank with water and dye, make a pass over a field, then see what it hit.
The advantage flying sprayers have over a tractor is loss. Driving a tractor through a field will crush a percentage of your crop, and a percentage of that crushed crop will never recover.
Depending on the field that percentage can be as high as 10. Depending on the crop, the value you gain by aerial application can be in the 10s of thousands of dollars.
That's a solved problem with precision guided, self-steering tractors. They also remember where they planted crops so they won't roll over plants later.
There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in agtech, most of it is practical, too. But yeah, guidance add-ons to a farmer's existing equipment has a pretty good return on investment for the farmer.
That’s an overly simplistic assertion. It depends on the crop, how it is planted, and maturity.
There is a soy bean pest that can invade crops on my family’s farm. If treatment is needed early, the cost effective solution is to drive a spray rig. Later in the season, that causes too much crop damage. So then it becomes a calculation of the loss due to pest versus cost of arial application.
In the end, it all comes down to cost per acre and the benefit needs to exceed that.
How tight are your rows that a high-boy or low-boy can't fit between them? When I still farmed, We sprayed late season crops with one of the two of those, with spray control to the square foot. That and auto steer meant we damaged about 40 plants total going into the end rows and out.
You're still not gaining much, right? You're just not losing what's already planted, but you could still plant more if you didn't have to drive in the first place - or do I misunderstand the precision driving?
By not having to drive a tractor through it regularly maybe crops can also be planted closer together? Although, there's still the harvesting at the end at which point you'd lose those gains again.
> Driving a tractor through a field will crush a percentage of your crop
Even if there are "tracks" to account for the tractor's wheels? Nothing would have been planted there in the first place?
I live in a rural area and there are huge grain fields all around me. At least for these kind of crops, the field is seeded 100%. There are no gaps for the tractor wheels. Having said that, you rarely see tractors pulling a sprayer in the first place anymore. Most crops around here are sprayed by purpose built sprayers that have tons of ground clearance, have relatively narrow tires, very wide booms, and are comparatively very light vs. a massive tractor. They can be built so light because they aren't used to pull heavy implements behind them. All they carry is the chemical, the spray booms, and the operator. Later in the season, it would be tough to pick out the path these things took through the field if you could at all. As for costs, the spraying is often done on contract so the farmers don't buy the sprayers in the first place: they pay for the service plus the chemicals.
For this kind of application, I think drones have a snowball's chance in hell of getting any kind of traction with farmers in the area. Their capacity is too small, their runtime is too short, the area they can cover per unit time is too poor, etc.
You are taking a very narrow view of what a drone is. The MQ-9A Reaper drone has an almost 2 ton payload capacity and flight endurance of 27 hours. I can totally envision a purpose built drone that could mount a crop dusters spray rig. It just most likely wouldn't be an electric quadcopter.
Seriously? That is a completely different animal from the drone portrayed in the article. Anything in that league wouldn't be anywhere near cost effective vs. something like a conventional crop sprayer plane.
I am serious that I can envision a drone that could be used for crop dusting. I personally wouldn't use a quad copter, but probably something more like a 20-30 foot flying wing powered by a small gas engine. My example of a predator drone was to illustrate that it is entirely possible to design a UAV that greatly exceeds the specs needed for crop dusting. I also think most people here are vastly underestimating what a Agricultural UAV is capable of. Take a look at this page https://store.tmotor.com/product/P80-v3-pin-kv100-p-type.htm... and some of their possible configurations.
I think just adding a gas engine to a quadcopter would give it enough endurance to make it useful. Obviously a crop duster is going to be fairly large to start with - it needs some space just to store the things it will spray.
Lol I was going to say: None of the hundreds of square miles of crops where I grew up have this problem. Maybe corn and soybean fields omit the structure to attempt to get more yield? In which case, crushing some of it is still likely a positive yield compared to not planting ruts.
Crush becomes a problem for us in Canola and Lentils during desiccation; which is a chemical application at the end of the season right before havest. As the name implies, desiccation takes a crop which might have variations in "greenness"/maturity and kills it all down to a consistent state for harvest.
At this point in the crops life, the canopy is quite filled out, and a large portion of it is already dry. By driving through the feild at this time you knock the seed from the pod onto the ground, where it is impossible to harvest. Thus it is better to do desiccation from the air.
Commercial drones like this typically come with enough batteries to run non-stop.
Even at the standard 1C charge rate, you'd only need 4 batteries to effectively fly non-stop.
In the article they mention the system was meant for rough terrain where they were hand-spraying because the tractor couldn't get there, but I guess they're working on making it viable for large flat farms now.
NathanBuilds on YouTube has a little robot which does the same thing with a large magnifying glass. A concept I am very eager to demo on an industrial scale.
Tractors are extremely heavy and do cause soil compaction issues. I'm honestly not sure how much of a factor the compaction issues when you're also running a mono-crop operation and spraying regularly with fertilizers and poisons, but at a minimum it wouldn't help.
the real economic issue is which is cheaper, people or robots?
keep in mind that robots are made by people, which strongly suggests using people directly is cheaper
the real social issue is you must meddle with the self-development of said people in order to keep it cheap, simply put you must make sure those people stay poor. in modernity this happens across countries (i.e. my theory that countries as a whole are kept poor). I call that practice neocolonialism
> keep in mind that robots are made by people, which strongly suggests using people directly is cheaper
Possibly the biggest logical miss I've ever seen on this site. This would only be true if one person built one robot ever, and that robot was only as efficient as them.
Now would something like this https://carbonrobotics.com be cheaper than dumping chemicals on your field? I don't know. We could certainly do without the negative downstream effects of various pesticides and weed killers though.
> keep in mind that robots are made by people, which strongly suggests using people directly is cheaper
And that is why my roof is held up by people I hire to hold it up. Bricks would complain less and would be more reliable, but they are more expensive than people because bricks are made by people.
Except that is not how the cost of things works, is it?
> And that is why my roof is held up by people I hire to hold it up. Bricks would complain less and would be more reliable, but they are more expensive than people because bricks are made by people.
I should have downvoted you for this: I laughed so hard it woke my wife from a nap in the next room.
Why do you suppose that robots being made by people means that using people directly is cheaper?
By that logic, no factories or anything would be automated, as it would be cheaper to use the people directly rather than having people build the automation.
Why do farmers even use tractors? Someone had to build that tractor. Wouldn't it be cheaper to hire the people to plant the crop directly?
because a robot costs the cost of the robot plus the cost of the people making the robot
whereas people only cost what people cost.
the real reason we do have technology is because keeping people poor is terribly evil, and doing that only to have cheap things is somehow even worse. which is the real point I'm making by the way
moreover, we're all missing another subtle point I omitted. herbicides are even cheaper than people, robots, or any combination of them. but as it turns out, killing the soil is also a pretty bad thing to do.
I have a modest proposal. Instead of using people to grow food we could instead just eat people. That would solve unemployment, world hunger, and overpopulation.
To get around legal issues one could just focus on fetuses instead of birthed persons. Pluses include: fetuses are a renewable resource; if harvested early enough, bone tissue is not crunchy; no need to clean out fecal material from the abdomen. This will probably be especially helpful in future space exploration.
In the UK there was a lasagna meat scandal when the beef was found to be mostly horses. I think it was from redirected medical controls. The general reaction was, well at least it's meat. I wonder if economic and food standards will declined so badly that by the time something like Soylent Green becomes a reality the general reaction will again be, at least it's meat and not those bugs they keep trying to feed us.
> Wouldn't this compete with piloted crop-dusting aircraft, not tractors?
Yes, and given that flying crop dusters is pretty dangerous (old, shoddily maintained aircraft and "runways", low altitudes over rough terrain) and exposes the fields to lead from the fuel, it's high time to get rid of that.
A drone with an automated recharger+resupply base can operate entirely on its own.
Tractors famously (its in the name) can pull many times their own weight using a fuel that is cheap and energy dense compared to drone batteries... Farmers don't have enough margin for their most expensive capital outlay to not be extremely good at what they need it for.
Tractors can carry many tons of liquid that needs to be sprayed on crops, as well as an implement that can spray a many yards wide swath of crops.
A tractor is also something that is needed for the rest of the farming and harvesting operation.
Of course they are powerful and can pull a lot of weight but it struggles doing that. You can hear it in the sound when you let go of the clutch, the stress of the chassis and all that it brings with it. At the end of a day it sprays much more than it is needed, so lose-lose situation.
Now if you combine this drone with a targeted spray depositing, you see where I'm getting?
P.S. I don't know why my comment was down voted, but ignorance knows no boundaries.
> Of course they are powerful and can pull a lot of weight but it struggles doing that.
I don't know what that sentence means. Tractors, by definition, don't struggle to pull. Quite notoriously, they can pull hard enough to flip themselves over.
Now combine the tractor with targeted spray depositing. Any technology that can be strapped to a drone, can be made cheaper by removing the expensive, fragile drone bits, and then strapped to a tractor. Farmers aren't in the business of spraying expensive chemicals onto crops that don't need them. They are VERY conscious of the costs, and are always looking for a way to lower them.
The point is that a tractor is necessary equipment that farmer already owns, and can take a combination of implements that are tried and tested, and capable of being incrementally improved on. The only thing that a drone can do that a tractor can't is move quickly.
I agree with you that a farm needs at least one tractor. But this drone is much better because it burns less fuel, can fly autonomously, and it's much cheaper to run; no tractor can beat that.
That doesn’t seem at all obvious - this thing has to spend a ton of energy on keeping the payload away from gravity that a tractor does not.
It also has a pretty high capex bar to clear - it can’t replace a tractor, the farmer needs that still for implements, so it is purely additive in the capex area :/
Still, looks super duper cool and presumably has some tricks it can do a tractor can’t!
In China, DJI's agricultural drones have basically become standard equipment on large farms. Actually, these devices are quite cheap, although buying them requires a big chunk of money, maybe even a loan. But calling them cheap is just because with a bit of simple math, farmers immediately see it as a good deal.
China might not have as much large-scale agricultural machinery, just like Africa doesn't have as many landline networks, but that doesn't stop everyone from using mobile phones, right?
Plus, there's not much redundant regulation in the countryside, no need to submit plans, and most rural areas don't care about approvals. They just want to grow more crops. It's not about fearing hard work, worrying about toxic pesticides, or not being able to endure the sun and wind; they simply want to make the barren land produce more food.
In fact, many farms only have a second-hand van worth a few hundred dollars. Some even use tricycles to transport these expensive devices. Many farmers don't understand English and operate based on memory of the icons, and that's enough. They buy lots and lots of batteries, working from dawn till dusk. After finishing their own work, they help neighbors with spraying at a low price, just to quickly recover the costs.
Many people think that tractors combined with large machinery are efficient, but actually, it depends on the situation. Fragmented small plots contracted to households are used for planting high-yield rice to maximize production. For example
As the other commenter pointed out, this competes with crop dusting, not tractors, although maybe it's possible that it could work for more targeted sprays? Some weeds for example are pretty resistant to standard herbicides, so if you could, for relatively low labor costs, target just those weeds, that could potentially be worth it.
But really, I'm just looking forwards to when the current level of driving automation in tractors incorporates a little more machine vision and intelligence. I believe it is all GPS based right now and works in corn and other crops where there aren't any obstacles and there isn't really much that can go wrong.
But if there was a way to have our tractor mow our orchard for us without hitting any trees or irrigation lines, that would be fantastic
Crop dusting and spraying by tractors are in the same market. Everyone but the smallest farmers makes the comparison on whether crop dusting or using tractors is cheaper (including factors like application efficiency and crop loss from tractor tracks).
> As the other commenter pointed out, this competes with crop dusting, not tractors, although maybe it's possible that it could work for more targeted sprays? Some weeds for example are pretty resistant to standard herbicides, so if you could, for relatively low labor costs, target just those weeds, that could potentially be worth it.
Someone needs to do a cost comparison of using crop dusters vs. drones per square mile.
Cost isn't important. the real question is labor. There are very few qualified crop duster pilots, and so farmers often have trouble getting a pilot when they need it. Few pilots go into this area because it doesn't pay well compared to other commercial flying and it is a lot more dangerous.
Well which way is it? If the demand is so high that pilots are difficult to come by, how can it not pay well enough to attract pilots? Sounds to me like the farmers need to open their wallets...
Nobody orders crop dusting because they think it's fun, they do it to increase the profit from their crops. If it has utility, then it will give the farmer the budget and the willingness to pay. If crop dusting doesn't have enough utility for the farmers to pay a salary attractive enough for pilots to do the work, then it is inefficient. Alternatively the farmers or the pilots are acting irrationally.
> If it has utility, then it will give the farmer the budget and the willingness to pay.
That's not how it works at all.
Farmers are rational and the price system is behaving efficiently here. The waiting time is part of the price.
Crop dusting can still be better than not crop dusting even if the profit does not cover the "full" market price. Example: crop dusting improves farm profit by $5000/year, but costs either $8000 for a pilot in a market with abundant high quality pilots, or $4000 in a market of 10th percentile pilots with long wait times. If the actual effect of crop dusting is the same in both cases, a rational farmer will choose the latter over no crop dusting at all.
If they don't loose money or produce for waiting, then the originally stated problem of farmers having to wait for too long, is not really a problem. Then all is good, I guess?
Like poor people spending 3x commuting compared to rich people is not a problem, right? Market cleared, deadweight loss minimized, freedom from serfdom achieved, mission accomplished.
Just because someone is maximizing their (ordinal) utility given their budget set, doesn't mean that they're well off by any absolute/cardinal measurement.
That said, nobody here actually said it was a problem for farmers, only that wait times are long. I'm just pushing back on your incorrect pseudoeconomic analysis.
> farmers often have trouble getting a pilot when they need it.
That quote made it out to be a problem. If the farmer is wealthy or not has no significance to the effectivity of crop dusting. The same considerations and calculations would be true even in a communist economy.
I spoke with some aerial applicators a few years back that I used to work with when I was in the fertilizer business. Asked them if they were worried about drones possibly taking part of their business and they just laughed. They told me the payload on the drones would never make them serious competition.
Then a couple of years later they admitted they'd lost some of their business to drones but they weren't worried it would ever be all that much. I told them that there was one way to make sure it never would hurt them and that was to get into drone spraying themselves.
A large majority of farmers will want someone else to do it for them. I said you know the customer, you know their fields and are well versed with the chemicals. They said I don't know, but you could see they were thinking hard. These guys were second generation aerial applicators and if their kids wanted to enter the business they sure needed to consider it. One of them has a son in college who is already a pilot.
They could except for regulations. It is the same as driverless cars only much more disastrous potentially. You wouldn't want them crashing into other planes or flying into buildings.
I saw a drone demonstrated by a startup in 2005-2006 that could leave the airport in the morning and do aerial infrared photography all day and return at dusk. The FAA would never give them permission to fly and the company failed. Saw another company around 2015 show me the exact same thing except they had a chip that let them avoid aircraft and geofenced them from entering space around all airports. The FAA let them do a preliminary test which they passed but never let them have permanent permission so they ran out of capital and failed.
I fly ultralights / gliders. We don't have a way to deal with these yet and a system like that could be lethal to us. There is a reason they didn't get permission.
Gasoline motors are much less reliable than electric motors and require a lot more maintenance.
Drones are small and cheap, so for the same amount of money you can have a lot of drones. So you should not compare load capacity for a single drone to an airplane, but instead compare load per dollar.
Being big is not always an advantage.
Multirotor drones have the advantage compared to planes that they drop straight down when failing, so less risk of continuing a long distance and crash in a town. Crashed drones also makes less of a mess when they do crash. FAA should adjust policy (for farming drones) due to this different risk profile.
There's absolutely no reason to run on gas whatsoever. A huge octocopter and hot-swappable batteries would have plenty of endurance, range limited only by the number of battery packs, cheaper to run, and far cleaner.
Because normal crop dusting airplanes: are big and heavy, forcing big batteries. Hotswapping 10kg battery pack is much more feasible than hotswapping 100kg one. You can work whole day using 3 batteries regardless of size, but having to swap 10kg battery every 5 minute is more feasible than swapping 100kg battery every 30 minutes. Those planes cant land right at fields edge, so big chunk of energy in its battery would be needed to fly to and from nearest airstrip.
These things have to be trailered with a pickup truck and trailer, so there's only positive value in making it takeoff, land, and refill on the trailer and making it quick to swap batteries and refill the tank.
No, the farmer wants an electric tractor, possibly with a small diesel engine to charge the battery as needed. Fuel is an insanely high cost for farmers, and the complexity of the ICE systems means high maintenance and repair costs too.
> small diesel engine to charge the battery as needed. Fuel is an insanely high cost for farmers, and the complexity of the ICE systems means high maintenance and repair costs too.
That is what they want, but that isn't something they can get. A 100 horsepower tractor will be expected to deliver 100 horsepower for 15 hours without stopping (it is common to eat while driving, though you will stop for a bathroom break here and there). That means you need to have a 100 horsepower engine. Contrast a Tesla which is rated at 600 horsepower - but realistically only can give you that for a few seconds before you are at speed and then only needs to deliver about 20 horsepower. The batteries in a Tesla would run that 100 horsepower tractor for maybe an hour, so a 20 horsepower engine in a Tesla could easially extend you a lot of range.
I work for John Deere. I don't speak for the company. I can tell you that we are looking at electric for small tractors - there are a lot of people who only use small tractors for a couple hours per day (or less). We have hybrid tractors for some applications, but there are others that hybird isn't useful. The rules of chemistry tell us that a battery will never be useful for large tractors, and even small tractors it is questionable if batteries can ever be good enough to go all day (if you look at our electric mower the dealer is required to examine your lot to make sure it isn't too big). We have tried things like put a 1km cord on a tractor - I don't know what the status of that is.
> The rules of chemistry tell us that a battery will never be useful for large tractors, and even small tractors it is questionable if batteries can ever be good enough to go all day
How can batteries work in a transport truck hauling massive weight long distances but we can’t figure it out for tractors?
How can batteries work in mining equipment and logging trucks (charged by small ICE engines on board) for long hours per day, not for tractors?
I am having trouble understanding what the fundamental differences are.
Those are not small enines in mining. Smaller than non hybride but still large. Trucks are not common yet, and trucks using the full power an engine can provide most of the time.
Tractors may not care about weight, but soil does. Current tractors cause soil compaction issues in farm fields, even heavier weight-inefficient-battery laden tractors would be that much worse.
I was about to post that the diesel-electric technology for tractors just wasn’t ready yet but I looked it up and apparently it is. Electric motors are amazing and I guess the efficiency lost in converting mechanical energy to electricity and back is partly made up for by running the engine more efficiently and by partly by not needing a transmission.
Also, farmers have room to put down wind turbines on their land. Quite a few of them up here in northern germany have picked up subsidies and are now generating power from just a few square meters of land. One larger farming business also has a biogas burner.
With such a setup and a bit of energy storage somewhere, electric vehicles look even more attractive.
The tractors I’m more familiar with are 500hp and when in use they run 18+ hour days a very long way from infrastructure. It would be nice to replace those with diesel-electric for maintenance reasons but I highly doubt there is a viable fully electric solution. We would be more likely to find alternatives to plowing and other more efficient farming practices.
There are already major pieces of mining equipment and trucks for moving mining material that operate on this technology. If it works for them I don’t see why farming would be more challenging.
Mines do this for equipment that operates a fixed track (they can move the track, but not too often). When the equipment is more than a power cord away from a grid connection they use diesel. However electric is so much cheaper than diesel they will go out of their way to have a less efficient mine if it is reasonably possible.
> Mines do this for equipment that operates a fixed track
Ok, ignore mines (though I don’t think this statement is universally true), you can find the same examples in forestry where equipment out in the bush runs on electric batteries being charged by small onboard ICE engines, and the logging trucks themselves are switching to this as well. None are on tracks.
Onboard ICE sounds more like diesel electric than fully electric. The addition of some batteries for efficiency and peak power availability doesn’t change things all much I would still call that diesel electric.
I think you'll find that this imagined generality does not go as far as you would like. Mines tend to be on hard ground while farms tend to be on dirt, make a tractor too heavy and it'll get bogged. When the tractor is an hours drive away from the nearest power outlet it just does not seem realistic. Diesel-electric can make a lot of sense, the fuel is the same and it does the same thing but more efficiently and with lower maintenance costs. I don't hate the idea of fully electric, if anyone can make the math work then great, but for the use case I mentioned I highly doubt it.
It means two hours drive away from the nearest paved road.
Massive fuel trucks load up local tanks, smaller fuel trucks fill up from there and take it directly to the tractor in the field, a drive that can easily take an hour on its own. Tractors are slow and usually operating out in some distant field, you can’t bring the tractor to a central point every time you need to power up and you can’t run cables that long for those power levels. It’s really hard to beat diesel for utility.
The technology is so good, Stellantis is putting it in the next gen Ramcharger trucks. Eliminates range anxiety while maintaining all the benefits of electric.
Most farms have more than enough space to generate all of the power they need. A few solar panels go a long way. Even in winter, these things still generate power. Add some wind mills (which some farms already have) and they'd be pretty much self sufficient. The rest can come from the grid. Though most farmers would probably end up being net producers.
The main factor slowing down the transition to battery electric is the cost of batteries. As this comes down, more equipment is going to be electrified. But especially heavy equipment needs a lot of power and therefor relatively large batteries. What's prohibitively expensive this year might be totally doable just a few years down the line.
The goal of involving "smarter" agg technology should be to allow more complex agricultural methods without increasing manual workload too much. There seems to be a lot of ideas around how diversity can be utilized to increase both sustainability and yield. But there seems to be a long uphill battle against mono cultures before reaching some kind of disruptions since the margins are so thin.
In theory monocultures allow for higher yield per acre, but in practice it’s really hard to keep the soil healthy enough to sustain yields over time without adding (eventually) unsustainable amounts of fertiliser.
Crop rotation and leaving land fallow for a year can get you some extra time, but monoculture farming practices are inherently destructive to the soil, and mitigating the damage done takes a long time.
Also worth noting that a huge amount of destructive monoculture farming has nothing whatsoever to do with food production - it’s for bioethanol and such.
Yeah, they exist. They're in use today. They're being set up to be a lower impact, more precise way of spraying fields autonomously. All the operator has to do is wait for the drone to spray part of the field and return when batteries and/or the application (spray, seed) is low. Refill, swap batteries, and press "continue".
If you can automate the reloading process you can completely eliminate a huge time suck. Seeding probably isn't viable in some soils because you might actually need a drill.
For EU techno farmers:
As much of a bureaucratic monster the EU is, using drones to spray stuff here is possible.
As per answer of the commission, spraying is consider aerial application and thus per se allowed in cases where aerial application would be allowed.
Currently the horizons projects ICAERUS2, SPADE3, and CHAMELEON4 are investigating agricultural drones, legislation will probably be amended once they conclude.
I work in the agtech industry, software for record keeping of spray paths
I wondered out loud why the industry spends millions on making us valuable vulnerable monkeys fly the helicopters when drones would be an order of magnitude cheaper
Turns out the companies that do the work were all started and operated by pilots
Progress happens one funeral (retirement) at a time
No the farmer doesn't. The key paragraph is at the end:
> He’s currently leading development of a new type of drone—a scout—designed to quickly inspect fields for pest infestations or poor growth or to assess crop yields. But these days his job is more about managing his team of engineers than about doing hands-on engineering himself. “I’m more of a translator between the engineers and the market needs,” he says.
The spray drone idea is IMO ridiculous because a proper crop duster plane carries 100x the volume at only 10x the cost (or lower) of this drone. The scout drone on the other hand could give farmers new abilities that they could only replicate by physically walking the fields, but I'm pretty sure drone companies like DJI have been in this market for nearly a decade.
I'd like to call complete bullshit on this line:
> These tractors can cost up to half a million dollars to purchase and about US $7 a hectare to operate.
The vast majority of farmers don't use half million dollar tractors for spraying. The half million dollar beasts are for tilling megafarms that'd require a multi-million dollar army of drones to replicate just one function of the tractor (spraying - which isn't the main function anyway).
Best case scenario they face the same issue crop duster planes do: Farmers usually can't afford their own plane on top of all the other things they need, which means they won't be able to afford their own drones. Most also can't really afford to hire them out on a regular basis because all the farmers want to rent them all at the same time, leading to competition over a limited resource.
> The spray drone idea is IMO ridiculous because a proper crop duster plane carries 100x the volume at only 10x the cost (or lower) of this drone.
This is also one of the most dangerous piloting jobs there is and a fair number of experienced die in crashes. They have to fly very low across a field then turn around at the end - if anything goes wrong (not seeing a power line at the end of the field) you have no altitude to recover. Only a few pilots will even fly them and they tend to be in demand which means when a farmer wants the work done sometimes they can't get it done. Plus those planes are mostly from the 1970s or before - sure rebuilt a few times, but still overall old. There is a lot of room to replace a crop duster even if this is more expensive (and not needing a pilot could make is less expensive).
> The vast majority of farmers don't use half million dollar tractors for spraying. The half million dollar beasts are for tilling megafarms that'd require a multi-million dollar army of drones to replicate just one function of the tractor (spraying - which isn't the main function anyway).
A brand new John Deere R4023 sparer has a list price of $330k. I assume there are options, but also farmers can get various discounts but that still is a good price start with for discussion. Of course if you are buying a new sprayer you have more than 100 acres.
I believe the concept is that through targeted application rather than broadcast application, you don't NEED to carry 100x the volume as you would in traditional aerial applicator. You carry less product, but you need to use less, and therefore you have to purchase less. There are also the environmental benefits of not applying herbicide where it not actually needed, and benefits of not expending energy and resources to produce a wasted product.
Also you are underestimating the cost differential between the drone and a crewed aircraft. The article says this guy's drone costs $50,000. $500,000 is going to buy you a 30 year old clapped out pile of crap with a radial piston engine and a belly full of corrosion. A new crop duster, for example a very common, and fairly small, Air Tractor AT-600, is going to be $1.7-2.0M depending on options.
And, you have not accounted for the extraordinarily high recurring cost of operating a small turbine aircraft, including flight crew, ground crew, maintenance, storage and insurance. Fuel burn is 75 gallons per hour at $6.25 per gallon (That's today's price at the duster base in Linton, North Dakota, 7L2 airport. Say hi to Mike the chief mechanic for me.) So a direct operating cost of $500/hour right off the bat, whether you are spraying or commuting. And the cost of maintaining a fixed base of operation (i.e. an airport.) Costs which mostly go poof with a drone you can throw in a pickup truck. And of course the cost of operating in a highly regulated industry such as ongoing training and certification, maintaining an anti-drug program and workforce monitoring, etc.
And yes, this would clearly be marketed as a service for hire, as many existing agricultural services are. That is not novel in the industry.
DJI spray drones are quite an old idea, a much better value than Hylio drones, and very popular in China. They're especially favored in smaller-acerage targeted application scenarios like orchards as well as specialty applications like terrace farms where tractors are less efficient, but they work OK on large-scale fields as well. An Agras T50 is $25k. That's not that bad compared to a normal tractor and really, really cheap compared to an Air Tractor, especially when you start considering wet cost.
The big issue preventing you from seeing more of these the US is regulatory. Right now, agricultural drones are a huge pain to fly, although the situation has been improving:
* The drone needs both an operator and a visual observer.
* The drone needs to be within line of sight (this is easier when it's huge, but still a significant limitation).
* The operator needs an FAA Part 107 license. Until this year they also needed a second-class medical as part of the overweight waiver process, but now third-class medicals are OK.
* The operator needs a Part 137 spray license.
* The drone needs to be on a special list to get a 49 USC Section 44807 exception (basically, a carve-out to Part 137 allowing certain drones above 55lb to be used for agriculture). Until recently, this process was horrible and required specific authorization, experimental certificates, and all kinds of waivers, but thankfully it's been cleaned up.
Hylio got a waiver to allow up to 3 simultaneous flights and no visual observer. If more of these exemptions are issued (or the overall regulation loosens), I suspect spray drones will actually become quite popular. Even with the current pilot limitations, it's already possible to run an agricultural spray business using DJI drones that easily beats traditional crop dusting in terms of price-per-acre. The main issue is acres available, since the current setup is so inefficient - there just isn't enough supply to really disrupt the crop dusting market when it comes to large megafarms. Once a single operator can observe autonomous flight from tens of drones at once, things will become quite competitive - you can buy a lot of T50s for the price of an Air Tractor.
Fixed-wing spray drones are an even better idea than inefficient quadcopters, and I look forward to seeing more of these designs, like the Pyka Pelican, hit the market as well.
There seems to be a big farmer preference for buying such technology in the form of tractor attachments. Several companies have built lightweight ag robots that slowly cruise fields and zap weeds. They can be lightweight since they don't have to spray that much volume, so tanks are small. Those things aren't selling. What's selling are attachments that hook onto the back of a tractor far too big for the job. But if you need this kind of thing, you probably have a hulking huge tractor anyway. And the big ones have air conditioning.
Lightweight isn't an advantage. Big is an advantage. Soil compaction is sub-linear with weight, but linear with tire width. As such the more you can do from the one set of tire tracks the better. Bonus if you can use the exact same tire tracks as everything else that crossed the field, since those tracks are already damaged and you can't really do much more. This every place the tire touched the ground is a big negative of tracks - sure you get less compaction in the track, but when you turn at the end of the field you touch a lot more ground and so overall are worse.
See a soil expert for more. There are lots of different soil types and many different considerations. I gave some generally rules that are typically true, but there are often other considerations and compromises. There is no one size fits all.
I can see robotics succeeding in agriculture, but maybe not drones and pesticides.
Robots going down the rows, physically pulling out weeds, zapping bugs with lasers, delivering optimal water/fertilizer right to the roots. Dunno if there’s economy of scale available for it though. Maybe too specialized.
Iirc, there’s already a salmon farming robot that detects and shoots parasites with lasers.
It seems like it would be way cheaper and more energy efficient to have something long and thin, like a snake or a centipede (with wheels or tracks) that can just roll up and down between crop rows. And, if you're claiming it an autonomous vehicle then something on the ground seems easier to deal with. Certainly it's easier legally.
I wonder why not smallish robots on ground? Something I imagine similar to those we send on Mars and can move on most terrains.
They seem easy to build and program (at least naive me means it's way easier than autonomous cars) and can do it without requiring air space which is a huge regulatory issue in most of the world.
FTA: "“I’ve become a big proponent of not trying to outsmart the customers,” he says. “They tell us what their pain points are and what they want to see in the product. Don’t overengineer it. Always check with the end users that what you’re building is going to be useful.”"
In general farmers should start spraying less and, instead, embrace biodiversity. It's good for nature and bad for Monsanto. Oh, and after just one or two years the recovering diversity also acts on its own against vermin and pests. The result are overall tougher crops.
For niche spraying where you can't get to the ground I'd rather see a robot on little slits or something. If you can get to the ground, well, those chemicals are heavy and drones run on pretty terrible batteries.
>These tractors can cost up to half a million dollars to purchase and about US $7 a hectare to operate.
>A pair of Hylio’s drones cost a fifth of that, Erickson says, and operating them costs about a quarter of the price.
About zero farmers are buying a tractor solely for spraying crops, but honestly if you have the money for a new tractor, knock yourself out with a stupid drone, why not?
Been watching a bunch of these companies at the trade shows every year. This outfit https://guardian.ag/ is the one to beat. Size and charge wise is up where it needs to be (most of the other entrants don’t have the capacity/flight time) and they have a strong open source pitch IIRC. Pretty cool rig. It even kind looks like a John Deere tractor. Smart marketing there.
It would be more interesting how to use smaller machines directly powered by agrivoltaic, to finally start reducing diesel in agriculture. Since nothing is so quick in that field I imaging there is nothing wrong if a certain activity normally done in one day took 4-5 days following Sun. A bit of spread p.v. for mere self consumption does not means loosing usable space for agriculture and that would be a perfect match.
Well, spray herbicides does not demand much power so it could be quick, moving soil demand much power, cutting grass and alike demand much power, irrigation demand a certain amount of power.
I suppose that a slowly moving large machine could be powered by p.v. for spraying chemicals and for certain kind of irrigation, deep water pumping probably eat more power but still enough for a 40kWp p.v. spread around a field, for the field. Moving soil will demand few days instead of one, but for that I see not much issues, similarly harvesting. Am I wrong?
An alternative view based on Energy returns on Energy invested-
1. Most agriculture pumps orders of magnitude more Energy into the farm to make fewer calories of food. Petroleum becoming food is indeed useful as it is fungible for human consumption.
2. As soil productivity is dropping around the globe given pesticides and fertilizer usage, the EROI is dropping.
3. The future of farming, few believe is in making more from less as the hidden subsidies disappear.
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apcnf.in is one of the world's largest natural farming transitions with a few bits of contrarian genius that could be highlighted here:
1. Rather than dumping a lot of nitrogen into field they innoculate it with a microbial power few months before the rain. This 'pre monsoon dry sowing' uses many times less fertilizer and uses time and daily breathing cycles of earth for a few months to spiral in microbes. Look up ghana jeevamruta on youtube for details.
2. They use foliar sprays which urges plant leaves to develop filament like needles on leaves turning them hygroscopic. There is much more water in the air than in rivers + freshwater bodies on every continent.
3. They try to trigger mineral - fungus - bacteria - root rhizosphere - plant synergies rather than pumping nutrition by brute force. These small spirals become larger and larger and are highly highly multithreaded natural algorithms.
4. Science has recently discovered that seeds contain millions of microbes. They coat the seeds with beneficial coating as seed balls and plant them few months before the rains. The day and night cycles of breathing in and out, with rythmic background of dryness and wetness urges them to grow. They also auto deploy at the right time, vs being artificially timed by irrigation.
5. They work on fundamentals of plant immunity which leads to wild grass like resistance and endurance in plants without artificial irrigation. These plants are also pest resistant and the produce has lower perishability in tune of weeks.
6. They discovered that good fungus extends and grows into the plant body like rails that carry microbes. The microbial 'water' is coated with thick cell walls and doesn't dry as easily as irrigation water.
7. They keep the field under 365 day green cover via 5 layers of plants. This might not be equally possible in all bioregions but helps protect the soil from blazing heat.
These are just some of the points I noticed in their attempts to lower the net input cost at farming. Most developed economies do not have to think of this today given financial, logostic and govt subsidies but as inflation grows and supply chains become fragile, I feel this way of thinking has a lot of merit for those trying to make things work under sustenance economics.
The problem is the regulatory environment on two fronts. First ( in Canada) the pesticides I'd like to use are not registered for drone application, even if they are registered for application from helicopter or plane.
Second, I don't have priority airspace rights. Which means I have to have a person watching both the drone and surrounding airspace for crop dusters or personal low flying aircraft. Even if I file a flight plan weeks ahead of time and a NOTAM [notice to all airmen] i am required to ground my drone if an aircraft with a person is nearby. Even if they have failed to file NOTAMs, which in the case of my local spray dudes is 100% of the time. This makes completing a scouting or spraying job more labour intensive than using a tractor because I often require a spotter at the far end of a field.
Until the regulatory issues are sorted out, and drones can be operated with Beyond Visual Line of Sight rules, you won't see massa adoption of this tech.
My drone fleet is sitting and collecting dust at the moment, which is a shame because they do provide valuable information.