MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

 - Let me say my name's Lyndon Kelley. I work for MSU Extension. I'm working on this field crop sponsored webinar today. We have three sponsors today, GreenStone Farm Credit, North Central SARE Program, The Sustainable Agriculture and Research Program, and Mark Wolbers with the Alaskan Pioneer Fruit Growers Association. Thank you to our sponsors. Kirk Babcock. So we've got a really good mix of presenters here in this track. We've got some really hard science, basic science folks. Then we've got some other folks like Kirk who are more on the applied side. So Kirk, you can go ahead and share your screen. Kirk is gonna share a little bit about his work with drones, thanks Kirk. - [Kirk] Okay, let me get this set up here. Yeah, I lost my screen for Zoom, but that's okay. We'll just go with it here. All right. My name is Kirk Babcock. I am with Ariel Ag Technologies. And I wanna talk a little bit today about the capability of aerial drones, what we're doing today, where we're kind of going with it and really focusing probably more on the applying chemicals, the spray drones and where those are at. Okay. A little bit about myself. As a company, I started in about 2018 doing aerial mapping, doing some field multi-spectral imaging, looking at crop health, monitoring. But what I was doing is gathering a lot of data and not know exactly what to do with it. So what that led me down into is actually getting into the spray drones. And I'm currently a custom applicator with Rantizo and you'll hear me mention that name a few times. So just who Rantizo is, Rantizo is a precision Ag company. That's using drones to deliver Ag inputs in the field based out of Iowa city, Iowa. Let's see we're doing operations and, they handle all the operations and training for the spray drones for us. They do all the research and development and they are our FAA part 137 certificate holder. Some of the topics I wanna talk about right now is where have we been with the drones, the remote sensing drones today. Talk a little bit about spray drones of today. Some current operations that we run here with Aerial Ag, dealing with spray drones and how we do that today. Then I also wanna go into where are we going with this technology, the future of the remote sensing and the future of the drone spraying. But more importantly around that is how they combine in the future. And I find that real fascinating where these two are actually starting to merge together. So let's talk a little bit about where have we been. Just remember how, when drones first came out in agriculture how we talked about how everything was gonna of revolutionized Ag with the drones. And everyone was quick to get on board, must get these drones, early drones just had cameras. Some of them remember that it was just GoPros attached to them. And while the imagery and everything was really good, we got to see a lot of perspectives from fields that we weren't used to seeing. They were clear than satellite, cheaper than man aircraft. And then we were able to get NDVI type imagery off of it. But it brought in a lot of questions to the end user, the growers and all that of, okay, I have this data, what am I looking at? And how do I analyze this data and then what do I do with it? We, there's a lot of people that have a lot of data, but what are we doing with that data? So, the start of it has really caused more questions than answers, but we're getting into a time now out where we're doing a lot with this data and the things that are coming out of this are pretty impressive. Some of the drones that are in use today, we got rotary drones, which are probably the most highly used drones, the Quadcopter, Hexcopters, the good thing about them they take off and land vertically. They be used in small areas. Some of the downside only about 10 to 20 minute flights. But then we have a lot of fixed wing drones coming out. And the nice thing about them is the longer flight times, some of them 90 minutes, some of them even longer. You can cover a lot of acres and down, little bit of a downside is, their hand launched and they need a lot more area for taking off and landing. Well, not necessarily taking off cause you're hand launching, but for landing. A little bit of the best of both worlds with this is the VTOL technology. And you can see that down here. It's I call it the best of both worlds, although it is a shorter flight time and usually roughly around 45 minutes, still better than the rotary drones but a lot less than a fixed drone. They all have their place and purpose, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Some of those sensors we're doing today, Dr. Basso, talked heavily on these and great presentation. Appreciated doing that. But we're using RGB. Still a great sensor for the use for the growers and all that to actually see what's going on. With it we do stand counts, yield estimations, VARI maps, which are a lot like NDVI maps, but using RGB imaging. Multispectral, getting very familiar with these, the vegetation indices, your NDVI, NDRE, use it for crop health and disease detection. And this would be Multispectral here. Thermal. Starting to do a lot of thermal work. A lot with irrigation. It's good for detecting leaks, clogs. You can see what's being irrigated. Leaf temperatures. It's great for that. And I'm also fascinated with the it's use in livestock, not only in and detecting where livestock is, but the future of monitoring health of your livestock with thermal. And then the LIDAR. It's good for doing precision elevation is what I like to see with it. And gives soil insights and analysis irrigation and working with minimizing erosion. Some of the spray drones that we have today. Most of the major manufacturers right now are companies called DJI, XAG, which those two are out of China. And Hylio, which is out of Texas. Those are probably some of the main manufacturers. There are a lot of other manufacturers out there, but these are the major ones. This one would be a Hylio in the upper right hand corner, DJI down here and XAG, they call it down here. Most of them are four to eight motors. Generally a swath between four feet and 20 feet. A lot of their marketing will say a lot more in it, but we found effective swaths to be pretty good within those ranges. And they really function more like an air blast sprayer than just a standard broadcast type sprayer. And that is from the impact of the propulsion above pushing the spray patterns down. Now a little bit of drone spraying in Michigan. Where are we with this? Well, Michigan just got approved this last July in 2021. So it's really new to Michigan and there's actually two commercially licensed applicators currently in the State of Michigan. And both of us are flying the DJIs AGRAS MG-1P that's what we flew last year. This year I'll get into a little bit of what we're going to. So where does the drone spraying fit in? What I like to tell people that the, sometimes technology isn't always a replacement for things, but it's complimentary to things. And in this case, this is really complimentary technology. It's not a replacement for ground rigs or the aerial aircraft. They have their own niche in what they're able to do. And it really is another application in your IPM toolbox, gives you another resource that you can go to. Muddy fields or things like that. It gives you options, more options than you previously had. And they're really good for critical timed and repeated applications because of its accuracy of application. You're putting the exact same amount of application in every time in every, in the right place. And it does address and fix a lot of the, some of the labor problem shortages that we are experiencing. The potentials of drone spraying. There's quite a bit right now. In addition to your herbicide, fungicide, insecticide, cover crop seeding. These are able to seed cover crops, apply precision nutrition, rescue sprays, pollination, research trials, burn downs for herbicide, really good for some fence rows and waterways where it's hard to get sprayers into, or you would've normally gone in with a smaller sprayer backpack even. We can go into with drone spraying, those awkward acres. And what we mean by awkward acres is the land that makes it very difficult to maneuver ground rigs in and then aerial aircraft won't go in. There's quite a few of those acres in Michigan, we're finding out, and this is an option that they've never had in the past. We've had them used as pasture sprays, livestock sprays. And I put that question mark in there because it, we're learning new things and potentials daily and people just asking questions, Hey, can this do that? And those are the things that we're looking at finding out. Some of the users that use them. The growers, imagery companies, micronutrient companies, the agronomists, agribusinesses and the research. What are some of the advantages of to drone spraying? I have a bunch listed here, the control of application, spot applications, variable rate applications. You're not compacting the soil, you're not damaging crops. You're not overusing chemicals. So there's a lot of advantages as you can see there. Now, some of the challenges that we have currently to drone spring. And this is presently is technology itself. We are very limited on battery size, tank size, coverage, advancement costs. The batteries are improving. We are seeing that and tank size. I think it was in the earlier presentation about a two and a half gallon is what we've started out using, going up to almost an eight gallon with the new dry that's gonna be coming out. So technology is moving very fast with drones. So it's taking care of those things. The advancement cost is really technology related because it's things like, you buy a drone now and within one year it's already outdated. So having to buy on the new technology makes it very difficult. - [Eric] So Kirk. - [Kirk] It's difficult sometimes in the specialty crop arena, although this is getting a lot better too, in the future. - [Eric] Kirk. - [Kirk] Yeah. - [Eric] Quick question for you. So on that last slide, talking about, you know, the capacity of the drone. So, what is, what have you found to be sort of the basement for your spray rate? So for example, your two and a half gallon drone, how many gallons per acre can you get away with, let's say for a fungicide or a herbicide? You know, can it be a lot lower than with a typical aerial application because of that down force with the drone or what have you found? - [Kirk] That is a great question, because right now we're limited to spraying based on the aerial rates. So like in fungicide, a lot of what we did was two gallons per acre rate. So, as you can see with a two and a half gallon tank, you're only getting, well, basically an acre every tankful and coming back every time. You get really good at tankering and tendering and sending it right back out. So yeah, the technology with tank size now as addressing it to the effectiveness with crops of going to lower rate, we have done some tests. I don't know of the results yet. I know a lot of the places like Bayer and all them are looking into lower rate application from drones, especially because as of how it applies being a type of air blast instead of just spraying it down you don't need, the coverage is coming from the air penetration pushing the particles instead of the amount of chemical or, not necessarily a chemical, but water application with it. So does that answer your question, Eric? - [Eric] Yeah. And you'll probably address this at some point, and we'll also have another speaker coming up this afternoon talking about some of the practical applications of drone spring, but can you just maybe summarize what's the current status of regulation in Michigan for spraying with drones? Can anyone do it? What do you have to have in place? Can you speak to that? - [Kirk] Yeah, actually right there on the regulations right now, the, in order to fly a spray drone, you have to be a 107 pilot and more importantly for the FAA 137 pilot certificate or organizational certificate. And that's the same as what the agricultural aircraft operators operate under. So we are held under the same regulations as they are. So it's makes it very difficult for the average grower to just purchase and then go out and spray your own fields or your own crops or anything like that because of the regulation behind it. The there's also waivers that you have to get. It was mentioned earlier today about the flights over 55 pounds. It's always been limited to the 55 pounds hence that's why we have the two and a half gallon tank. This year we're actually able to go up to about a, fly 170 pound drone, but it also comes with higher regulation and training and things like that. So that is some of the regulations with it. As far as state licensing, required to have commercial pesticide applicator license, and aerial endorsement part of that with the State of Michigan. So it isn't like anyone could just go out and legally, well, you can legally buy the drone but you can't legally just go out and start applying with it. You have FAA regulations and also state regulations that you have to, or requirements that you have to meet. Does that answer that question here? - [Eric] Yep. I think so. Great. Thanks Kirk. - [Kirk] Yep. Some other challenge to the drone spraying that we found out is insurance. The availability of insurance companies out there that will insure spray drones. I know whenever you start talking to some of them individually, you tell them you wanna spray chemical from a drone and it's almost like they hang up on you. Another reason why I went with Rantizo is they have people that cover the insurance. Cause not only just insurance on the drone itself, you also have to have from the State of Michigan, the comprehensive chemical insurance and liability from damage or drift. So just like any other commercial applicator with pesticide, you have to carry those insurances. Some of the equipment that we used in 2021, here we have an example of the DJI AGRAS MG-1P. Notice its weight was 55 pounds and that met the FAA requirements for this year. But downsize was the small tanks. The one that we had is Rantizo modified, it does have booms added onto it. And the pumps in the back are modified larger pumps to enable us to spray with the booms. We are able to get a 20 foot swath out of there. You can add a spreader into here. And we got about a 10 to 15 acres per hour at a two gallon per acre rate. Some other equipment that we used to help us spraying was the, for me, it was the Phantom 4 RTK. We were able to go in and map fields ahead of time. And where this is an advantage is, we get precision boundaries with this. And not only precision boundaries, but also detects and maps out all the obstacles in the fields, which I've found there are quite a few obstacles. But doing this ahead of time and then uploading all that information into the spray drone allows the spray drone to go out and fly more autonomously than we normally would have it. We use our RTK base stations for precision correction. And the reason I put in the tender trailer there, because when you saw that two and a half gallon tank, there's a lot of tendering going on. A lot of batteries swaps, a lot of charging. We are able to stay continuously going, but it does require having a good generator charging system, constantly mixing. So, it was an important piece of equipment to be able the spray with the smaller drones. And now I'm gonna kind of look into what applications have been done 2021. And this is in Michigan that we've actually done. This first one here is herbicide spot spraying that we did. The grower actually wanted to see if they can save costs on chemical usage in spraying on early stage corn. And in this one we had about 111 acre of area that we were going to look at and they wanted Roundup and Liberty and aerial rate was three gallons per acre on this. And what this map is showing is what we went out and mapped. And we actually detected where the weeds were in the field and we created areas that the drone could go out and spray. What we determine from this is looking, he compared it to his ground application of what he normally does, which is blanket coverage. You can see the significant decrease in the amount of acres that needed to be sprayed 10 versus 111, a big savings in Roundup and Liberty, which bought a lot of costs down there. But obviously time because we're only two and a half gallon tank, it took eight hours to do this 111 acres. So the cost was still a lot lower on this, even with the eight hours. It, he estimated would've taken him a couple hours to spray that with his ground rig. And these are last year older cost. Obviously these costs for Roundup and Liberty are not like what it was last year. So yeah, there was a, the result from this is there was definitely a savings in how much was sprayed and how much was used. And in this case it was a cost savings too. Okay. In this case here, same scenario, same grower actually too in early stage corn. There was 55 acres. And in this case, we determined through the same method of finding all the weeds and figuring out the best areas to break it down the map to spot spray in. We figured we would've sprayed about 18 acres of this field of Roundup and Liberty. And he decided not to have us do this. He went ahead and blanket application this field mostly because of time. And, so the takeoff from this, there's still the tools available from remote sensing to see if there's going to be a savings and to allow the growers, agronomists or whatever, to make the decision on whether to spray or not. There's another herbicide spot spraying in late stage soybeans. And this was 130 acre field. We ended up spraying 33 of it, Roundup and Liberty. Now, the reason we did this one is because he wanted, it had a lot of large weed pressure and he didn't wanna send that through the combine and distribute all those weed seeds. So he wanted it, killed off And so we used Roundup and Liberty. The field was very muddy and he normally would've brought in his ground application and done this, but because of it being so muddy, he decided to spray this with the drone. And we did this at three gallons per acre. Now some more use cases that we've done in Michigan with spraying, here is, see, we've done over about a thousand acres this last year spraying, mostly the awkward acres like I talked about. And a lot of it also was from canceled Ag planes. There was a lot of that. It was a heavy fu, heavy season for fungicide, and there was a lot of canceled Ag planes. So, and that was all applied at the aerial rate of two gallons per acre. And this is another showing the fungicide application over corn. And here you can really see how it opens up the corn and acts more like an air blast sprayer pushing down the chemical down into it. - [Eric] So Kirk, that's a definite benefit, having it that low and having that down pressure. Would there be any benefit to raising it up so that you're able to cover a wider swath or are you really just still limited by that boom with? - [Kirk] No, I think we can actually raise it up and benefit from it. And that's some of the trials we're gonna be doing with MSU this year, is finding optimal Heights of where to place the drones and to get the best effective coverage. And that is one of the, some of the big unknowns about drones is exactly where to place them to get the best coverage in a certain crop. A lot of variabilities, and we work within a, probably a three to 10 foot high above the crop, which is gonna affect your swath with, dealing with, pushing that air down. But we try not to go above 10 cause we haven't really done any testing for us over 10. So, yeah, I think we can. We need a lot more testing and I think we're gonna start getting that the year. - [Eric] Here's another question for you. What's the size of the restricted zone around commercial airports for flying drones and not necessarily for spraying but remote sensing really just in general. - [Kirk] The size of around airports - [Eric] Right. That restricted zone, like how far, how close can you get to an airport and apply or fly one of these drones? - [Kirk] Well, for these here, I'm actually, some of the fields we did last year were right next to Marshall airport. Like the property was like right up against it. These drones don't fly too high and anything that is, and these are a lot of smaller airports. Now, as you get to the larger airports, the different classifications, then there may be an area that you may have to get a waiver or permission to fly in at a certain altitude. So we have to coordinate going in on those airports if we're going to hit the altitudes that is, are restricted. - [Eric] OK, thanks. - [Kirk] And this one here is on some weed. As you can see, they're up a lot higher on this one. Some foliar feeding that the was done this year And some cover crop. I said earlier that one of the things is that this can be used very well for is cover crop. And especially with Michigan, spreading into standing crops so we can get established ahead of time. And this one was turnips and radishes, put at 23 pounds per acre. - [Eric] Kirk, we're still seeing a screen that says fungicide insecticide spraying. - [Kirk] Oh, are you? Okay. Let me, What screen are you on now? - [Eric] Same. And there was probably you were talking about wheat and we didn't actually see any video with that. It was seeing a picture - [Kirk] Okay. Let me, And is it still on the same screen? - [Eric] Yeah, maybe it's kind of clunky, but maybe stop sharing and try to reshare it. - [Kirk] Yep. - [Eric] See if that helps. Okay. So now we're seeing a screen that says cover crop spreading. - [Kirk] Okay. Yeah. It might be the videos that are in this that are locking it up. - [Eric] Here's another question for you. Is there a rule that these spray drones must be within line of sight? I know that's pretty much the standard for drones at this point. Is there anything that you see that we're getting away from having to be in line of sight? - [Kirk] Yeah. Everything is currently. We have to be within line of sight. We are currently looking at waivers of beyond line of sight. And we are moving towards that. And I think as we demonstrate to the FAA the ability and use of these drones and how they operate will be able to break that beyond line of sight barrier. - [Eric] Okay. So here's, it's a good question, cause I know a lot of folks have this question. And you know, this whole thing with drones flying over other people's property can be contentious. So the question is, does the property owner own or control the rights to that airspace above their land? And then how do you assert those property rights if they do have that right. - [Kirk] Well, it depends on what's being done and the answer, the basic answer to that is no, the federal aviation administration controls all airspace above property. And so if you're licensed to fly in that airspace, there is nothing that really owner can do about that. It's really looked at no different than a standard aircraft flying over. Now with that said, there are some municipalities and all that, that deal with oh would it be called like voyeurism and things like that, where you're actually monitoring the property owner or things like that. That is illegal. So, it all depends on what is being done. Are you transiting, just going over or what is the purpose? Are you surveilling it? So as long as you're doing standard operations of agriculture, then you wouldn't be in any violation. But the moment you start using it to surveil or do things like that, then you could come up against a lot of heavy regulation and legalities. - [Eric] Okay. Thanks. - [Kirk] And we do get, especially spraying obviously, you're getting property owners permission. So, we don't really run into that with the spraying operation, but we have run into it with when we're doing mapping. Because sometimes the drones will come up to borders and it looks like it's right on the property. The property line owners will look up and see it there. So it does bring some concern. But what we like to do when we go out to operation is talk to neighbors and things like that. Let let them know what's going on and that, not to be threatened by it. Let's see. Eric, I'm gonna jump ahead. Do you, what screen is showing now? Cause I don't see the. - [Eric] Now we've got one with the half of a boom says drone and self propelled. - [Kirk] Okay. This was just showing how we've actually used the drones and self propelled in the same field. And what this was is, where you'll see the drone at, is, was a muddy area that they didn't wanna go into. So, they actually had a spray and it just so happened to work out when we were spraying at the same time and he took a video of it. So, So it shows that they can work together. Okay. This will bring us to swarming technology. Now, swarming what, we're licensed to with the MG-1P, we're licensed to swarm three of these at one time with one operator. So we do have that capability and permission from the FAA. And we're currently working on that on the new drone that we'll be using this year. Okay. What's coming in 2022? Where are we going? Well, the new drone that I keep mentioning is the DJI AGRAS T-30. That's what we'll be using in our operation this year. It is about 170 pounds loaded, eight gallon tank, 12 to 29 foot swath, 20 to 30 acres per hour and it's 75 pound spreader tank. So a lot of those challenges that we had in technology are starting to get overtaken and we're still able to meet some, make this thing really more useful, A little bit about operations of how we do this today. It's really a matter of these five things. We go out and we map, we identify, diagnose, apply and verify. With mapping, and this one here is really an example more of orchard, but it's really how we apply it to everything. We will actually take the RTK drone out and we will fly it and map the area that needs to be flown. And with the software, we are actually able to identify not only the, what needs to be sprayed, but it'll also identify any obstacles, buildings, wires, anything that's out there it'll actually mark them for us. And with this, we can actually plan our routes and the route is not only, it is a three dimensional route with the height. So, any terrain issues you got valley or hills or things like that, it will, because of the mapping that was done, it'll set these routes based on that height. So you'll keep that height above the canopy consistent. We'll go out and identify. We'll use multispectral drones to identify any crop health issues. And we'll take that data to the growers, agronomists. And that's where it'll be discussed where or what needs to be done, if anything needs to be done. Ground scouting, after that, however, that's where it is determined on whether to apply. And if it is determined to apply, example of T-30, that's out there spraying in an orchard mode configuration it's called It just shows the path that it takes and how it sets up. After spraying, we go out and verify. You always wanna verify that what you have done has been effective. You can use RGB, imagery, multispectral imagery, whatever you found ahead of time, you wanna make sure it's correcting then that the applications are correct. The efficiency. It, the biggest question I get is how much can these do? And the best answer I can give people is, it depends. There's so much variability on terrain, the type of crop, how many rates, what rate is being flown at. That all depends, that's all what makes up the efficiency. So, but on rough averages, flat fields, two gallon per acre rate, which is what a lot of aerial rates are labeled wise, is about 10 to 15 acres per hour. Vineyards, five to 10 acres per hour. And the T-30 that we're gonna be using, some of the testing we've done is at 20 to 30 acres per hour, but the manufacturer originally came out with 40 acres per hour on their marketing. We did some tests, we're still doing tests down in Texas right out with it. And we're coming up with about 20 to 30 acres per hour being able to use it. Little bit on costs. Of just buying a drone, it always looks pretty good cause you're always just looking at the drone itself. And we've seen them starting it around 20,000. Some times a little cheaper, some a little bit more, but that's pretty much a rough average. But really it's always the hidden costs of what is really required to run that drone. Not only do you buy the drone, the chargers, the batteries, the tendering, everything you need. So it, that and brings up the price quite a bit, the costs I should say of purchasing them. But if you look at doing with applications contractors, it's roughly around 150 an hour to contract out the drone spraying. And we've found it to range between 10 and $15 an acre on row crop. And some specialty between 15 and 30 an acre. Little bit about the future of remote sensing. The biggest things I see are autonomous improvements, the AI driven insights, which is really probably the largest area that's improving that we're seeing. The sensors, the multispectral sensors themselves, we're starting to see a lot of them combining because in the past we're, we've been seeing, well, you have to have a sensor for this, fly it, may have to change the payload of the drone with a different sensor go fly it. A lot of those sensor companies are looking at combining your multispectral, your RGB, your thermal, all in one sensor and being able to capture all that at one flight. And like I said, the AI driven insights are probably where I'm most excited about. Being able to use RGB imagery from drones, to be able to do the weed detection, insect damage, disease pressure. It's actually detects them, takes the images, detects them and can come out with solutions of what needs to be done. Now as far the few of drone spraying, I see a lot of improvements coming out in the pumps and nozzles. But we're also seeing, especially a conference I went to recently company, one of the chemical companies in Brazil, Brazil uses a lot of drones currently and their folks wanted the chemical companies to make the chemicals for the drones so that goes through, it doesn't clog the system. It's basically formulated for drone use. So we're starting to see a lot of that of chemical companies developing the chemicals that to be used specifically in the drones. So that's a big thing that's coming. As we've talked about earlier today, lower rate applications testing. I know we did a lot with chemical companies last year on test plots and lower rate. So I'm waiting to get the results from there and see if they change or eventually add in the future where you have ground application, aerial application, and you may have a drone application on the label. So as we can prove that. I see improved coverages getting the chemical where it needs to be. And another big thing I think is a approved autonomy, especially with mixing and filling of the drones. And another example we have is of the larger drones. Asia and Europe are, I would say about two years ahead of us in the using of drone technology. There's already a DJI T-40 that's out there and then use currently. And it has a bigger spray tank, 10 and a half gallons, 110 pounds spreading, one and a half tons fertilizer per hour. So, and they've changed the pumps. So they're already out there it's just getting them to be used in this country is a lot more regulation. Now, the combined future. This is where it gets I think pretty interesting and you'll see where all the sensing and the spraying works together. Where it's going is the scouting drone will go out and map a field. Then that drone will return and upload a its data. The data is analyzed automatically, and this is all without any user intervention. Any issues will found and reported and or treated. And then prescriptions and areas are sent to the spray drone and that's autonomously docked and sitting there. The spray drone will automatically mix and fill the needed treatments. Then the spray drone will go out and treat the areas and maps. And it'll also map concurrently. So not only will it go out and spot spray the areas that need it, it's also gonna map while it's there to gather more data while it's up flying. The spray drone will return and automatically fill as needed, then go back out. It'll just keep doing that to take care of the problem. And then it returns and uploads all the application data as well as any data acquired during the application for future sensing. So, I think in the future with drones and remote sensing you do see them combined going together. And a lot of this will be autonomously without user intervention. And some of this stuff is in prototype right now. Currently there are some videos out there. Especially of autonomous drones, mixing and filling on their own and just coming back into a dock. So, it's, I think that's where the future's going with the spray drones. Now, sometimes I'll get a question about the large and small spray drones and if one's going to completely take out the other or replace the other, and I don't see that at all. I still see the small drones of having a place especially in a regulated area where different individuals can get them and use them, especially in a combined spot spring type of situation. Wherein the other drones will keep getting larger. But I think those are gonna be more training, more regulation, things like that. So, I think they're both gonna have a place in the future. It's a little bit of a summary that the spray drones are still in its infancy, but it does handle what we're doing today. We are working with it today and it'll continue to be there in the future. And the technology is gonna continue to change of the drones that are used in agriculture. Any questions? - [Eric] Great. Thanks, Kirk. We do have a couple questions in the Q&A and we've got a couple minutes left. So folks if you have any other questions you've been thinking about, go ahead and drop those into the Q&A. So this first one goes back to our discussion about that airspace and who controls what, and it really has to do with the height. So at what elevation does the FAA govern that airspace? You know, is it one inch above my head, five feet, 500 feet? You know, where does formal FAA airspace begin? - [Kirk] Well, they have controlled airspace and what they call uncontrolled airspace. A lot of what is closer to us is the uncontrolled airspace. Now, when I say uncontrolled, it doesn't mean that the FAA doesn't regulate. The FAA still regulates and owns uncontrolled airspace it just means that there is no human controller, actively monitoring and using it. Now, with that said, I, there's a lot of different municipalities of on heights above certain buildings and I have yet to see any one thing that says at what foot, how many feet above a certain thing that is owned by the FAA or controlled. Now, with that said, yeah, five, if you have a drone flying five feet above your roof, then I think there's a problem there. But it's really hard to say a definite foot because there really isn't a definite foot cause it just lists as airspace. A good example of that is if you're flying a drone over a building and drones are limited to 400 feet of height that you can do. But that 400 feet is also above a building. So they do take buildings and all that heights under consideration, but for a definite like five feet, 10 feet, where does it start, I don't know of any exact number of feet of where it starts at. - [Eric] So Kirk, I'll just read these two that I'm seeing here. Has your group done any work with golf courses? - [Kirk] Yes, actually not in the State of Michigan, but in the State of Wisconsin I know for sure. And Minnesota they have, and where I found the golf course managers, they said they're typically using them is not necessarily on the main green areas or fairways, but actually a lot of in the rough areas that it's hard for them to spray or get to, even in the aquatic part of the ponds they do a lot of that. So yeah, they're definitely doing a lot of golf course or starting to do a lot of golf course work. - [Eric] Okay. Here's another good question. Are these drones able to work at night when wind is typically less? I know initially the FAA said no drones at night, has that changed at all? - [Kirk] It has. We are able to fly at night with the MG 1-P, the current one that we have. The new one we have when we were reading the requirements that we got back from the FAA, it, we noticed it had the boiler plate not to be flown at night on the newer drone. So they're currently, I was told that they're calling them and it's another waiver that they have to get, but they said they'll be able to get that. Cause these drones are really designed to work a lot at night and with their outfitted, with their lights, the ability to 3D map ahead of time in obstacles, it's a perfect time for them to be flying. - [Eric] Okay. Right. Well, I've got no more questions in the Q&A, but I will selfishly ask one, hopefully you know. So if your FAA license has expired, let's say, you know, you let it lapse by a couple months, can you still use this online continuing education platform that FAA has developed to renew that license, or since you have let it lapse, you basically have to retest in order to reinstate that license? - [Kirk] No, from my understanding you're able to use, even if it goes over, to get current you just use the online now. And once you complete that you are considered current again. And I encourage those to use that online that have the 107. And if you haven't done it lately, to even go in there and renew it ahead of time, cause the new rules and regulations about flying at night and things like that are once you take the online renewal, it puts you update or up to date and you're able to fly with those renewal rules. So yeah. Able to do it online now, you don't have to do the go in and retest. So, I think the only test this required now is just the initial test to go in. - [Eric] All right. Well, thanks again Kirk, we appreciate your presentation.