MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

 - [Eric] All right, so next up is our last presenter for the day. And that is Jay Williams. So we're going to be circling back to this idea of being able to apply pesticides aerially. So Kirk already gave us a really good primer, what's required, systems that are required, and some application. And now Jay is going to talk specifically about, really boots on the ground. - All right, yes. Thanks for having me today. Kirk gave you a little bit of a background this morning, and there's going to be a little overlap between us just because Kirk and I both signed on with Rantizo as Rantizo contractors within a couple months of each other. So, we both went through this learning curve last year together, but I hope to give you a little bit of a background on why we thought it was important to bring drone technology to our farm in far Southern Michigan. So just a little background, our farm we have about 1300 acres that we farm in Hillsdale and Lenawee counties, corn, soybeans, wheat and alfalfa, pretty traditional row crop operation. And then we also do 1500 acres of custom tillage and planting for a large dairy. We do sell seed. We are a channel seeds men. So we're into the seed of things as well. And again, we started up the drone business in 2021. Give you a little perspective here of where we're located, yellow dot there in far Southeast Hillsdale county. We are in the Western lake Erie watershed, which was a key part of why we started of research in drones. We've been active in water testing on our farm and experimenting with cover crops and no-till. We host a field day each year that focuses on nutrient management and its impact on water quality. And because of a lot of this research and a lot of the testing we were doing, we trying to find a better way to handle some of our experiments, as well as some of our cover cropping into a standing crop. We had experimented with ground based seeders into a standing crop. Before we had done some aerial application before with airplanes, we were mostly pleased, but especially from a ground based perspective, we didn't want to run down our crop. So we started researching the drones. As Kirk said this morning, it's a pretty new technology it's in its infancy yet. But in our research, we looked at several companies and decided to go with Rantizo in city Iowa as our partner in this and utilize the same DJI MG-1P Drone that Kirk's using for our farm. A lot of this was based again on the cover crops. We've been cover cropping and transitioning to no-till since 2010. We experiment with a lot of multiple species covers and try to get those established earlier in the season as we can so that when we harvest those covers are already established. We do a lot of on farm research and plot work, trying to determine not only the best no-till and cover crop strategies, but also strategies such as fungicide and insecticide and those type of things that we may be a little bit more intense into the experimentation due to our field day hosting than some other farms. So an important part of our research, we did most of our research in 2020 surrounding drones. And for those of you who may remember 2019, it was a disaster from a water standpoint, we had a lot of prevent plant acres. Those acres didn't get planted. It was difficult to get them sprayed, difficult to get them seeded. So we'd had our fill of mud and ground based applications through that year, as well as we had the opportunity because of the prevent plant acres to experiment with a lot of different cover crops. So because of these reasons it helped reinforce that possibly drones would serve a purpose for us. So in late 2020 Kelly and I went to Iowa had the drone demonstrated to us by Rantizo, went back in December of 20, purchased the drone and spent the next several months here in the state, getting all the licenses upgraded, updated, and set so that we could do business here in the state. Obviously states don't have rules specific to drones yet a lot of them. And that took a little bit of time to work through that process, as well as just the regular process of updating our applicator licenses and those type of things so that we could ariel apply. So the first thing we did is we typically seed clovers into standing wheat crops early in the spring. So that was the first thing we did in spring of 21 is we seeded clovers with this drone. Took quite a bit of work getting calibrations figured out, and that's continues to be a challenge even as we do more small seeded mixes. Obviously each mix has its own specific density and flies at different rates. So we do a lot of experimentation that way, but the frost seeding gave us a good opportunity to experiment with the drone, to figure out what its capabilities were before we hung a 20 foot boom on it. And the picture off to left, that kind of outlines how these drones work. Once you have your field perimeter, which is noted in the white line there. You set your spray pattern, your widths and all those type of parameters. And then the drone essentially strikes an AB line on the angle that you choose. So it flies those straight patterns, slides over at the end into the next pass and continues on. It knows when it runs out of product. It flies back to you at the home base refills and knows where it ran out. So it goes back and starts back up again on that AB line pattern. So that gives you a little bit of an idea how these work, once you've got that perimeter laid out, really there's not much operator intervention, unless there's an obstacle or something like that, that comes up. It is fairly autonomous. After the spring season most of the summer work was based on fungicide application. We had in the state quite a bit of tar spot that came in later in the season. And we sprayed not only our ground, but also custom arid ground with fungicides. And that was our major workload for last year. We also did some herbicide work in some muck ground for guys that weren't able to get ground rigs in. And that seemed to work very, very well as well. We were able to map those irregular areas and fly those irregular shaped fields per say and save a crop that otherwise wouldn't have been saved. So here we have a couple videos of our fungicide application last summer. Can hear the generator in the background, or you may be able to hear that, we have a tender trailer that's dedicated to this, real similar to what Kurt's trailer is. We have generator power for the battery charging, as well as a water tank and mixing facility right in the trailer. So makes things more quite well. Let me move we get a good view. This screen off to left that's the display screen on the remote control. You can see how good a job the rotor machine does at moving the crop canopy, which was important for the fungicide coverage. We think that gives us a little more efficacy out of the fungicides, and then off the right here again, that gives you a good idea of how we fly over the canopy, what type of crop heights we can handle. One of the challenges we face is maintaining line of sight. The current rules require to maintain light of sight with the drone and in corn crops that can be a challenge, but we were able to make that work. And we saw some success last year. These two photos are from some fields that we sprayed with fungicide one week following the customer putting fungicide on through an irrigation pivot. And if you see the dark green areas on these two crop health imagery maps, you can see that where we sprayed with the drone is significantly healthier than the body of the field. And it resulted in a significant bushel per acre increase 15 to 20 bushels per acre better, where we sprayed with the drone versus the fungicide through the pivot. And we are using a smaller drone as well for crop health imagery, with a multi-spectral camera, as well as the functionality of being able to identify hotspots in fields and ground treat those spots, and build a map off that small drone imagery that we can then put into the application drone and just fly those spots. So instead of taking a ground rig into a hundred acre field and spraying the whole thing, when there's only 10 acres that really need a application, we can go out and target those areas really well, which is really at this time with the size of the drone that we have, the highest and best use. As Kirk said, we've been approved for a larger drone for this next year, which has significantly more capacity, which will definitely help that situation as well, and make that more of a broad acre unit. That leads us into some of the challenges we've faced. We've got a new drone out one year after we've already purchased one. So obviously you'd like to get a little more time out of investment than that, but we're on the front edge of an industry that's kind of in its infancy. So we expected that there would be some of those hiccups. Battery life is a challenge, we were running two chargers and eight batteries for this drone, our field layout doesn't serve itself well for this size tank capacity. You know, we have a lot of half mile long fields where you would run out of product at the back of the field, have to come back to the trailer empty refill, and it's going all the way back. So it really impacted that battery use significantly. We think with this new drone with more capacity, we can work through that and the new drone also has better battery capacity and a faster charge time. So again all this technology's changing quite quickly. The drone did a great job of doing what it was told, but it to have some technical issues that we had to resolve in the field, fortunately Rantizo gave us some great support. We also had some issues with gaps in the planting. So if you had a waterway in the middle of a field that was narrow or an unplanted corner of the field, it gave us some challenges because you're setting your crop height above canopy. Well when there's no canopy there, you're setting your crop heights above the ground. And the drone in some cases didn't have enough time to recover that altitude before obstacle avoidance kicked in and said, hey, there's something in front of me, meaning the crop was in front of it. So it did require some manual intervention there. Some of that's just learning perimeter of the field. Some of it's going to change with new technologies, but those were things we learned, but the crop imagery part portion, and being able to do spot spraying and get into areas that aren't accessible to ground rigs was key for us. We also came back and did some late fall seeding cover crops into standing crops. And we'll see how those over winter and how they came through into this coming spring. But we're hopeful that that's going to be an area that we can heavily use our drone late in the growing season. We also need to do some more tree trimming much to the shreg of my teenage boys. We've had to go around a lot of fields this fall and winter keeping trees trimmed back that's a challenge, and we're also actively out mapping field borders. So that those are set for this upcoming year. We are, as I said, expanding our charging capability, changing it for the new drone, as well as our tendering capabilities. So we can get more acres through the drone. We averaged about 12 acres an hour in fungicide use at a two gallon rate last year on a 20 foot spray pattern. So it was a little under what we expected, but within the range I guess of what's been said it could do. Part of that was a learning curve as well learning the different ways we could fly different shape fields to maximize our flight time but overall it went well. I think, you know, we've talked about a lot of technologies today, whether it's the aerial drones or the robots and part of why we got into this, is we knew that that technology was coming and we wanted our farm to be at the front end of that. We wanted to be able to learn, I guess, I mean sometimes it's a little painful learning, but we wanted to be able to learn so that when those technologies came down the road, we could take advantage of them, and if the time comes where our boys are interested in the farm, they would already have been exposed to that and would be ready to take our farm into the next generation from a technological standpoint. So the drone has served all those purposes. You know, obviously like we've discussed a couple times today, we've got a lot of autonomy coming down the pipe and it's going to take multiple forms, but it's all going to have that same basis of there won't necessarily be an operator in the cab or in the field. And that's one of the challenging things for me, all my career I've been in the field on a piece of machinery actively engaged in the process. And to be honest, I enjoy that and many farmers do. That's going to be an adjustment going forward for a lot of our producers because that enjoyment won't necessarily be there. We won't have that aspect of agriculture that we've really enjoyed. And that truly gives you a good feel for what the different soil types are, what the different characteristics of your farms are. It's going to be harder to do if you're not actively out there in the cab. So that's going to be an adjustment that we're going to have to make as well, that I don't believe has really been addressed today. I don't know how I'm going to instill that into the boys, that connection with the soil, it can be a challenge. So that's something we have to address as the industry the takes on this new world. So I would open it up four questions. - [Eric] Thanks, Jay. All right, folks, go ahead and put your questions into the Q&A. Got that in here right now. We do have still a couple minutes left. - Kirk probably answered all of them. - [Eric] So I'll ask a, oh, here's one. Good. How challenging was the learning curve regarding the software? - It really wasn't that bad. You know, we've got auto steer technology on the farm, so we're used to that. It really wasn't that hard from that perspective, from the AB the flying part. The worst part of that was trusting the technology, because you're not on the machine. You're trying to fly by camera and try to fly by line of sight of a machine that's well down the field, I will say that most of the issues we had with the drone are when I had to be involved as an operator, the drone itself, once it was flying did things properly and made it pretty easy. It's when I got involved and had to back away from a tree limb or some of those type of adjustments that we had some interesting days. - [Eric] Okay. Now there's certain rolling. What are the options like add-ons for the drone, like different sprayer options, things like that? - Well, the MG-1 process that we have now, we've got a Rantizo upgrade, which is a company we're contracted with that has a 20 foot boom system, higher capacity pumps, and a higher capacity computer to run those pumps. The drone is also, like I said, capable of doing dry spreading. So we have the dry spreader that snaps in the place of the spray tank itself. And the booms are configurable. So we can take the 20 foot boom off, go back to stock booms and spray things like orchard plants, vineyard plants, things like that. - [Eric] Okay. So this one may not be specifically for spraying, but maybe drones in general. What schools or training options are available for learning to pilot drones, learn the FAA rules, things like that? - The FAA rules, I did that all online. For my 107 license I used a couple online courses that were free of charge studied for about a week and was able to pass my FAA 107 license. Now the 137 license is essentially a crop dusting license or certification that Rantizo holds that I fly under. I could have gotten that myself. It involves quite a bit more record keeping quite a bit more study, but because of that and because of the insurance requirements of a spray drone which is tough to find an insurance company, that's going to ensure something like this. We decided to fly under FAA 137 that Rantizo holds and utilize their insurance. - [Eric] So as far as learning how to actually fly the drones, set the missions, things like that. Are you just kind of learning as you go? Or did you have any sort of training ahead of time? - Rantizo trained us. That was one of their requirements as being a drone company is they have to put us through a training. It was quite easy to learn. It's very intuitive. If anybody's played any kind of video game, basically with a joystick control, it's pretty easy to learn how to fly these drones. We didn't have either myself or my wife had much drone experience at all. I'd flown a couple hobby drones here and there, but nothing significant. And that lack of experience wasn't a hindrance to learning it. It was really easy with Rantizo help to learn how to do that. - [Eric] Okay Is this a profitable business model yet? Or do we have a few more years before drone technology is feasible? I know I'm sure it depends an awful lot on what you're spraying and how many hours in the day you can spray, but like what's your return on investment? - I will say it did not earn it's keep the first year out. Part of that is the learning curve. Part of it is the capacity of the drone. You know, we could get 60 to 80 acres a day, in a really hard day if we didn't have to move much. So, you know, if you're comparing that to a ground rig, you know, it's not near as many acres a day. And one of the largest hangups was there's only so much of me to go around with the different enterprises we have going. So I wasn't able to spray every day that I could have. I think this next generation drone gets us pretty close, to a good ROI where it would at least earn its keep, especially if we're able to swarm two or three of those. And we can get through the acres that are comparable to a ground rig. But again, if you go back to a year like 2019, even if you can only get 60 acres a day through a drone, it's 60 acres more than any ground based application system was going to get. And in our heavy clay soils that's an important trait for us. So there's several different factors that come into measuring that ROI. And I think as this develops over the next few years, we're going to be in line with other pieces of machinery. - [Eric] What's the typical maintenance on the drones? - That's kind of an unknown. Obviously you have you usual maintenance of cleaning out the spray system and winterizing and those type of things. With only a couple years of flight time company wide through these drones, we really don't know yet longevity of motors, the electronics, those type of things. And again all those systems are being upgraded into the new drone platform. So that's kind of an unknown yet. As far as longevity on those items. General maintenance is basically just kind of, you have to do prop inspections. I've had to replace blades it's quite simple to do. I've had to replace a motor that had an issue it's easy to do. There's nothing too complex in the general maintenance. Now I don't get into the computer brains of it or anything like that, but the props, the boom arms they're all carbon fiber, the parts can be a little expensive to replace, but they're they're easily replaceable. - [Eric] Okay. Well, I don't have any other questions in the Q&A, so Jay, thank you very much for coming, sharing your experience with us.