Flying tractors are a window into farming’s future

By Amanda Little

Early one recent morning in Vidalia, Georgia, third-generation farmer Greg Morgan launched an AG-230 drone carrying eight gallons of fungicide over a field of sweet onions. The chemical, which is essential to crop survival in this humid state, would typically be dragged and dripped from a 500-gallon tank behind Morgan’s 10,000-pound tractor. Now it fell in a fine mist from the spray jets of an 80-pound drone scudding 10 feet above his cash crop.

Vidalia Onions are a $150 million local industry that, like peaches, tomatoes and other specialty crops in the Southeast, have become increasingly vulnerable to climate change. Morgan has joined the vanguard of farmers who are turning away from tractors and toward drones as they adapt to the rising cost of chemicals and contend with hotter temperatures, heavier rains, heartier weeds and prolific pests.

Farmers have been using drones over the past 20 years mainly for aerial imaging — scanning farms from the sky with cameras to map where crops are thriving and failing. Now drones are being designed for hands-on crop management: enabled to spray herbicides, insecticides and foliar fertilizers with precision, and even to distribute seeds in planting season.

A “featherweight flying tractor” — that’s how Arthur Erickson, chief executive of manufacturer Hylio Inc, described the company’s agricultural drones. The Houston-based startup has seen demand for its drones soar over the past three years; roughly 700 of Hylio’s drones are now at work treating 700,000 acres of cropland annually — including Morgan’s farm.

Early adopters like 46-year-old Morgan are driving a major shift in the business of food and signaling a reality that investors and leaders of industrial agriculture should heed. Drones are poised to significantly disrupt the tractor industry, and unlike many other high-tech agricultural trends, this one is actually good for small and midsized farmers, and a big win for the planet, to boot.

Read | How Vietnam is trying to stop rice warming the planet

In the eight months since Morgan made his $40,000 investment — a whole lot cheaper than the roughly $700,000 it would have cost to replace his old ground rig — it has cut his fuel costs and already reduced his agrochemical usage by about 15 per cent. The drone has also enabled him to work his fields after heavy rains — when the ground is often too sodden for heavy equipment — and has spared his crop from the routine damage caused by tractors. It has also saved his soil from the compaction, bogging and erosion caused by farm machinery.

I first saw an agricultural drone (an “agrodrone”) at work last summer on a 2,000-acre soy and corn farm in Iowa. Fifth-generation farmer Brian Pickering and his 22-year-old daughter launched an MG-1P Rantizo drone manufactured by the Chinese giant, DJI, that spanned 9 feet wide with 8 whizzing propellers. Throughout the morning, the Pickerings guided their drone to spray an organic pesticide at a rate of about 2 gallons per acre and 14 acres per hour. In the afternoon it drizzled rye seeds across swaths of soy fields at a rate of 25 pounds per acre, sowing the cover crop that would grow after harvest.

These aerial acrobats use less than a tenth of the energy of ground tractors — and they don’t squash the crops, rut the earth or even touch the soil. Watching the drone at work, I got the same feeling I had when I test-drove my electric sedan after years of driving a bulky, gas-guzzling station wagon: that I was witnessing a better future.

Morgan’s onion farm offered even more convincing evidence. While Pickering runs a big commodity farm with a research and development budget to match, Morgan struggles to stay profitable on his 300 acres. The drone purchase for him was not a whiz-bang new toy, but a survival tool that allowed him to minimize his expenses. As Hylio’s Erikson sees it, drones “are like little X-wing fighters. They give small farmers the tools to be as efficient as some of the most advanced tractor technology at a fraction of the cost,” he said. And with far simpler hardware that farmers can operate and fix themselves.

As the hardware of agrodrones becomes increasingly sophisticated — with smaller, longer-lasting batteries and lighter, stronger carbon-fiber frames — so does the software, which is being developed by startups such as Canada’s Precision AI. The AI software will enable drones to use computer vision to identify exactly where and how much chemical is needed, plant by plant rather than blanketing an entire field with the same treatment.

Drones won’t completely replace tractors anytime soon. Their payload is limited to about 20 gallons, not nearly enough to handle the hundreds-of-pounds-per-acre fertilizer applications required between harvests. But they’re certainly capable of displacing the expensive, wasteful crop-dusting of herbicides and fungicides still performed by airplanes and helicopters across millions of acres.

Whereas crop-dusting spreads chemicals that bleed beyond the edges of the fields, drones deliver the chemicals in fine mists directly into the crop without overspill. The nimble flyers can work around obstacles like powerlines and trees, drastically increasing the efficiency of chemical applications.

While the advantages of agrodrones are significant, the two largest tractor producers — Deere & Co in the US and Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd in India, have begun to invest only half-heartedly in drones, which are currently a tiny fraction of John Deere’s $52 billion empire. The titans of mechanized agriculture may be slow to recognize it, but the era of flying tractors has arrived.

At his Georgia farm, Morgan says that, for now, he’s keeping a low profile with his drone as he learns how to wield the new tool. “I like to keep it hid,” he told me. Farmers are widely thought to be skeptical and old-fashioned, and for good reason — they've seen a lot of high-tech gadgets come and go that weren’t worth their salt.

“But I’ve been very well pleased with it,” Morgan said. “The fact of the matter is, the thing works.”