Idaho company contracts drone service to farmers
WILDER, Idaho – It looked like a hawk circling Bitner Vineyards on Wednesday evening, but the low buzzing sound gave it away as something more mechanical.
The mechanical creature created by Empire Unmanned, which is headquartered in Hayden, became the first commercial legal drone flown for agricultural purposes in the Treasure Valley. The Federal Aviation Administration recently began to permit commercial drones, creating a large opening for industry to start taking advantage of the systems for farming and other uses.
In Star, Idaho, Advanced Aviation Solutions – known as ADAVSO – is providing such services for local businesses in partnership with Empire. The companies have started to contract the service out to agricultural entities. Personal use of drones is still allowed, but farmers and others cannot use drones for commercial purposes unless they have the special permit obtained by companies like Empire. It is the only company in Idaho and the 13th nationally to obtain the permission.
The drone showcased at an event hosted by Empire Unmanned on Wednesday weighs only a pound and a half and is powered by enough battery for 45 minutes of flight. ADAVSO CEO Steve Edgar said the drone costs about $25,000 retail. It can fly up to 400 feet above the ground in Idaho, and adjusted itself in the air multiple times to deal with windy conditions. Operators stood by with a laptop to monitor the device’s flight path and record the data and images it sent back.
Ron Looney manages the flight path and controls of the machine while it’s flying for ADAVSO. He said the device can catch pest infestations in a field, relay data to improve seeding and fertilizing, create more water usage efficiency for a farmer and more. That’s good for a farmer because it can help increase crop yield, he said, but it’s also good for the environment.
“And (Wednesday) being Earth Day, we want to take care of the planet,” Looney said.
The drone used Wednesday is a professional mapping system that sends back data for geographic information systems. GIS expert Todd Buchanan, who works for ADAVSO and Ada County, said the drone helps detect and analyze areas of crop stress by taking pictures from the air – sometimes infrared, sometimes multi- or hyper-spectral images with the highest resolution. Normal satellite images can get up to 30 centimeters of resolution. The drone’s resolution is about 3 centimeters.
“Being able to see from the perspective of the sky opens up a whole new world for the farmer,” Buchanan said.
To Buchanan, today’s drones are for the industry what the personal computer was for the world in 1980. Estimates are that the industry will be worth $80 billion by 2025, and some have called it a paradigm shift in aviation and predicted unmanned commercial airplanes within 50 years.
Beyond agriculture, Empire Unmanned also says it can provide services for wildlife management, power line and tower inspections, wildfire support, grazing management and more.
“It’s amazing technology, and we’re just scratching the surface,” Buchanan said.