Testing Autonomous Fixed Wing Sprayers on Bananas
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Part of the challenge of bringing autonomy to agriculture is the fact that each crop has slightly different needs. To mitigate this risk, Pyka, an autonomous electric aircraft company that specializes in spraying, says they started in the banana industry. CEO Michael Norcia says spraying in that crop is frequent and consistent.
Norcia… “Bananas are an unusual crop. They’re sprayed year-round so, 50 sprays per year, so that really helps with that issue. You know we have to map out a plantation once and then we’re able to amortize all the time sort of mapping it out, doing risk assessments, etc. over the next 50 sprays.”
Norcia and his team at Pyka started deploying models in Latin America knowing they’d be well-supported since banana production is a valuable contributor to the economy.
Norcia…. “You know, crop spraying is a big part of growing anything but bananas it’s like a quarter of the whole operation is dealing with the chemical applications. So that is a really important element to it. The other one too is the regulatory aspect of these aircrafts are phenomenally daunting and so it’s really important for us to have backing from the government to try and help push these programs through. So the
banana-growing regions of the world, you know a single banana producer might represent 1-2% of the country’s GDP and so that’s very helpful in terms of getting the attention of a regulator and getting their buy-in to test a new technology.”
Norcia hopes to expand their automation to tailor to more crops in Brazil and eventually, the United States.
