Associate Farm Editor, Reagan Calk, had the chance to talk with the CEO and Co-Founder at Hylio, Arthur Erickson, about how precision crop spraying drones can help increase sustainability and tackle labor challenges.
While the ongoing worker shortage depends on location, Erickson said a common trend seen in the agriculture industry is that the younger generation is not showing interest in working in the fields.
“It is hard work; the pay isn’t competitive in a lot of cases versus tech jobs in the city, or admin or sales jobs in the city,” Erickson said. “You see a lot of young people who are not being incentivized for a number of reasons to go out and work in the fields.”
With fewer people willing to work out in the field, Erickson said farmers are left with a lot of crops to treat and harvest, and not enough hands to do so.
“Where the drones come in is they are a force multiplier,” Erickson said. “The drones still need human operators to utilize, except the fact is that you could have one human controlling four or five or six drones.”
Each drone can cover several hundred acres per day, Erickson said, so if one pilot is monitoring several drones, that means one person can be spraying around 1000 acres per day.
“Fewer chemicals and less water are needed for drone applications, meaning that you are putting less chemicals into the field,” Erickson said.
Drones are light and do not consume a substantial amount of energy, Erickson said, as opposed to a tractor.
“At the end of the day, it consumes less energy to do the same, if not more work than the traditional machinery and methods,” Erickson said. “You are saving on fuel costs, you are not emitting as much, you are not putting as much chemical into the ground. All of these things help with sustainability.”
The drones can specifically operate off of any Windows 10 or Windows 11 device, Erickson said, so typically, customers are paired with a Windows tablet to aid in mission planning, monitoring, and control.
There are financing options offered to purchase a drone from Hylio, Erickson said, that are listed on the website.
Hylio offers a few different types of drones that are all very advanced, Erickson said, but easy to operate for producers.
“Our models are really just separated by their payload capability,” Erickson said. “You will see on our website, we have four different models ranging from about two and a half gallons all the way up to 18 gallons.”
The Hylio website offers information about regulations for spray drones, spray tactics, and more. The regulations for spray drone operators have made positive strides recently, Erickson said, so if any producers are worried about time-consuming regulation-based processes, those have improved significantly.
“It is a good resource for learning even if you are not going to buy our products,” Erickson said.
