K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
The 21st-century farmer’s toolkit goes beyond tractors, balers, and mowers. Nowadays, it frequently includes drones too.
Unmanned aerial vehicles can help with a slew of farm tasks, from crop dusting to crop monitoring. The market for commercial agricultural drones is projected to grow from $1.2 billion in 2020 to $5.7 billion by 2025, per Markets and Markets.
And in the fast-growing world of cannabis farming specifically, the tech is widely used for security as well as crop monitoring, according to cultivators we spoke with. Some companies, like Houston-based drone startup Hylio, are looking to push into the cannabis space with crop-spraying drones too—a common use case among farmers in general—though the company hasn’t yet progressed beyond the demo stage with a cannabis company, and growers say that application is unusual for now.
Samantha Mikolajewski, cultivation manager at medical-cannabis cultivator at Maitri Genetics, told Emerging Tech Brew that because the company is focused on medical marijuana—and therefore grows indoors, to allow for full control over the process—drones aren’t used. But in a previous role at Good Buds Co, a 17-acre outdoor, recreational cultivation site in Canada, she used drones for crop monitoring.
“On a year-to-year basis, getting those high-quality photographs and timelapses really allowed us to monitor microclimates and assess areas where other cultivars would be more applicable to those microclimates,” Mik said. “If we have higher pest pressure or lower plant health in different areas, we would be able to see that [with drones].”
For Flora Growth, an all-outdoor cannabis company based in Colombia and traded on the Nasdaq, drones are commonly used for security and data collection, Jason Warnock, the company’s chief revenue officer, told us. Warnock said it’s the cannabis-industry standard to at least use drones for security.
“I think almost every grower uses drones, primarily to make assessments of their property, the security, having a good sense of all the positions around their facilities,” Warnock explained, adding that it’s particularly useful for large grows.
He also said he’s seen a lot of anti-drone technology in use, because growers are concerned about snooping or the infestation of their plants by a drone unwittingly carrying in pests.
“Because cannabis itself is very persnickety, it’s very delicate for a weed, growers are very, very, almost secretive—and protective—to not let any foreign...pathogen enter the space, including through drones,” Warnock said. “I’ve seen companies taking efforts, as much as having technologies, to take drones out of the sky.”
Continue reading: https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/stories/2021/09/17/weed-farmers-using-drones-crop-cops
Unmanned aerial vehicles can help with a slew of farm tasks, from crop dusting to crop monitoring. The market for commercial agricultural drones is projected to grow from $1.2 billion in 2020 to $5.7 billion by 2025, per Markets and Markets.
And in the fast-growing world of cannabis farming specifically, the tech is widely used for security as well as crop monitoring, according to cultivators we spoke with. Some companies, like Houston-based drone startup Hylio, are looking to push into the cannabis space with crop-spraying drones too—a common use case among farmers in general—though the company hasn’t yet progressed beyond the demo stage with a cannabis company, and growers say that application is unusual for now.
Samantha Mikolajewski, cultivation manager at medical-cannabis cultivator at Maitri Genetics, told Emerging Tech Brew that because the company is focused on medical marijuana—and therefore grows indoors, to allow for full control over the process—drones aren’t used. But in a previous role at Good Buds Co, a 17-acre outdoor, recreational cultivation site in Canada, she used drones for crop monitoring.
“On a year-to-year basis, getting those high-quality photographs and timelapses really allowed us to monitor microclimates and assess areas where other cultivars would be more applicable to those microclimates,” Mik said. “If we have higher pest pressure or lower plant health in different areas, we would be able to see that [with drones].”
For Flora Growth, an all-outdoor cannabis company based in Colombia and traded on the Nasdaq, drones are commonly used for security and data collection, Jason Warnock, the company’s chief revenue officer, told us. Warnock said it’s the cannabis-industry standard to at least use drones for security.
“I think almost every grower uses drones, primarily to make assessments of their property, the security, having a good sense of all the positions around their facilities,” Warnock explained, adding that it’s particularly useful for large grows.
He also said he’s seen a lot of anti-drone technology in use, because growers are concerned about snooping or the infestation of their plants by a drone unwittingly carrying in pests.
“Because cannabis itself is very persnickety, it’s very delicate for a weed, growers are very, very, almost secretive—and protective—to not let any foreign...pathogen enter the space, including through drones,” Warnock said. “I’ve seen companies taking efforts, as much as having technologies, to take drones out of the sky.”
Continue reading: https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/stories/2021/09/17/weed-farmers-using-drones-crop-cops