With easy access to food, most people in the United States take for granted how hard farmers work to keep grocery stores and supermarkets stocked year-round. In 2020, the agricultural industry represented 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product, contributing $1.055 trillion. Still, finding people willing to do the hard work required to maintain farmland continues to be a challenge. This is why technology has become key to ensuring the future success of the U.S. agricultural industry.

Drones, in particular, have made it possible for farmers who manage thousands of acres down to only a few hundred to efficiently carry out day-to-day tasks. Drones are not taking away jobs from people; farmers are already having a hard enough time finding workers. Instead, drones are creating agricultural jobs that previously didn’t exist. The agricultural drone market is currently valued at $2.08 billion and is expected to grow to $4.36 billion by 2029.

In 2015, University of Texas friends Arthur Erickson, Mike Oda, Nikhil Dixit, and Nick Nawratil came up with the idea to build their own drone company. Taking the idea out of the dorm room, they soon founded a custom-built drone product company called Hylio. Over the first few years in the industry, Hylio served a range of sectors, including agriculture, research, and surveying. By 2017, they were starting to find their niche in the drone industry. “From our early agricultural projects, we had seen that food producers often had no choice but to use slow, expensive, and ineffective tools because there were no alternatives,” the company website states. “We decided to commit ourselves to making farming safer, cheaper, easier, and more productive for growers by leveraging our autonomous UAS technology.”

Hylio spent the next couple of years developing and testing drones until they had developed one of the best agricultural drone products available in the United States. Hylio drones earned a reputation for being the next logical step in farming practices for a number of different applications. Evan Hansmeier, an equipment specialist with 21st Century Equipment in Nebraska, helps local farmers find the right tools for their farms, including drones from Hylio.

One example he gave was that farmers in his area are using drones to spray pest management chemicals. Evan mentioned that with Hylio’s easy-to-program and navigate drones, customers can create detailed pest mitigation plans. “Where we’re looking at areas where there might be 4 or 5, 6 acres in a field,” he explained, “where traditionally our customers today are spraying the entire field, when they only could be mitigating a problem that’s in that 5 or 6 acre zone. So, we’re hoping to take this drone technology and help our growers be more cost effective in targeting these pests. And then they can afford, hopefully, to multiple applications throughout the season.”

One factor that has been holding back the agricultural drone industry is that farmers can only use one drone at a time. For situations like the one described by Evan, this is a non-issue for a drone being used to treat a small area. With a flight time of 20-30 minutes, a drone can quickly treat 5-6 acres. But when a drone is needed for more expansive tasks like surveying, identifying crop health, or fertilizing over hundreds of acres, Hylio knew that there would have to be a way to utilize multiple drones simultaneously.

Recently, Hylio became the first agricultural drone company to receive a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use heavy-lift agricultural drones in a swarm. Current regulations allow one pilot to navigate one drone while a second person acts as an observer. With this new exemption from the FAA, one pilot can set 3 drones to autonomously navigate at one time, with one additional person acting as an observer. With Hylio’s drones, a farmer can use the technology to its fullest advantage.

For Hylio’s Arthur Erickson, he sees drone technology as a means to allow farmers to do what they need to do without going bankrupt. A Hylio drone system costs around $50,000, while a new tractor can cost between $300,000 and $700,000. “They’re so expensive,” Arthur said. “Over half a million dollars for a brand-new tractor these days, while we’re still reeling from the COVID stuff, supply chain issues.” With drone technology, specifically Hylio’s swarm technology, farmers will have the support they need to ensure they can get their job done. “This is a critical step forward in making UAS a viable option for even the largest-scale farming operations,” Arthur says. “Swarming drones over 55 pounds has long been the desperately sought holy grail in the agricultural industry.”

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