Top Dressing Fertilizer...With Drones?

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Drones for fertilizer? While drones are primarily used for pesticide application, Arthur Erickson, CEO of Hylio, says drones could help farmers make smaller, more targeted fertilizer applications throughout the growing season to provide just-in-time nutrition to plants.

Erickson… “A lot of pesticide applications in general, and that's of course the umbrella to include herbicide, insecticides, fungicides, these are the most bang for your buck operationally when it comes to drones at the moment. A lot of the paradigm for nutrients is still relying on this like heavy early or pre-season NPK, like hundreds of pounds per acre, that type of strategy or mindset. That's kind of ingrained. That's the way we've been doing it for a while. I think what you're going to see with precision tools like drones is you have this ability now to do I guess what I describe as like boutique application. Traditionally it's like, okay, I've got like the heavy equipment that's going to come out one time because that's when it's worth it to do all the fertilizing early in the season, like that's it basically. Now with the drones, because they're such a handy and low operation cost, low capital cost tool, you have them there ready to go whenever. You can go out and do biweekly top dressing of nutrients mid or later even in the season. Perhaps doing a lot of that and changing your entire paradigm of how you provide nutrients to your crops, that might end up not completely eliminating the need for these heavy fertilizer applications pre-season, but it could reduce it.”

Once again, that’s Arthur Erickson.