Drones for Farmers

 “9’ wingspan 5 feet nose to tail and weighs about 10 pounds. You just throw it in the air and it flies itself.”

Robert Blair, owner of Blair Farms in Kendrick ID, describes a plane equipped with video and still cameras that he makes as part of his Pine Creek Precision company. His UAV’s, or unmanned aerial vehicles are like military drones.

 “Made the auto-pilot bought the airframe off the shelf, from a hobby shop, and since then we started making our own, we made our first prototype and we’re in the process of making a few more changes to come out and start marketing it ourselves.” A winged little mini-crop inspector buzzing around a field can be a pretty powerful tool. “Using it to take pictures of our fields in order to  help find weeds, nutrition needs, hopefully water, monitoring cattle, wildlife management, those type of things.”

 You might wonder how all this information could be gleaned from an airplane flying around way up in the sky. The answer is in pixels. Robert says that you can feed information into a computer and examine your land with a resolution of 6 inches. I can’t do that standing on the ground with my reading glasses on.

Now…what about price? “We’re looking at the cost of our unit being around $30,000. And so when you equate that into dollars, It’s actually pretty minimal if you went in with some other farmers.”   Slick, Huh?