The “Bluegrass State” of Kentucky isn’t known for being friendly to drones.  The Virginia-based Mercatus Center, which evaluates all 50 states based on their readiness to promote the drone industry, ranks Kentucky near the bottom of the list at #43.  Other Deep South states share Kentucky’s concern that drones could spy on local citizens or infringe upon property rights.  But Kentucky, like South Carolina, has been especially resistant to realizing the many commercial benefits of drones.

One example:  Thanks to a state law passed just two years ago, it’s still illegal to fly a drone anywhere near an oil pipeline or a power grid, even though inspection drones – widely deployed in other US states – could save these companies time and money, and likely reduce consumer energy fees, too.

And it’s not just the private sector:  Barely a dozen of the state’s law enforcement agencies have acquired a single drone for widely accepted public safety benefits such as expedited search and rescue and enhanced crime and accident scene analysis.  In fact, Kentucky accounts for just 1% of the more than 1,600 police and fire department agencies that currently deploy drones. There are some exceptions:  Louisville, the state’s largest city, has been experimenting with a program that automatically deploys a drone to the site of gunfire.  The ShotSpot system is controversial.  It tends to target minority neighborhoods and dispatches a drone without the benefit of eyewitness reporting that a crime has occurred.  But after four years of pilot testing, and citing reductions in murders and violent assaults, the city swears by its drone-enhanced system and now wants to see it expanded and made permanent.

There are other signs that Kentucky is warming to drones. Later this fall, the state plans to incorporate drones into its flood and storm damage surveys, thanks to a grant it received several months ago from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  The Louisville division of the National Weather Service (NWS) has already purchased a new fleet of drones and has begun training a team of operators to deploy them.  The enhanced aerial imagery derived from drones, equipped with advanced photogrammetry cameras, will allow the Louisville NWS branch to create 3-D maps to help predict future flooding and to estimate its likely impacts, reducing the scope of property damage and minimizing the loss of life.

But the biggest drone breakthrough in Kentucky is actually occurring in one of the state’s largest economic sectors:  agriculture.  The state has vast farmland dedicated to corn and soybeans and to a lesser extent, tobacco.  It also has a huge livestock industry, with a special niche in horse breeding (and racing) and a significant investment in cattle..  Drones elsewhere in the South, including Georgia, are engaged in “precision” techniques for analyzing soil fertility and crop stress and for seeding, fertilizing and spraying crop land to reduce labor and input costs and to increase farm yields.  Drones can also help herd and maintain livestock, reducing threats from predators and preventing losses due to breaches in fencing.

Kentucky is about to become a major AgTech hub not only in the South but nationwide.  In 2020, the state’s Republican governor set up a consortium consisting of 16 different countries contributing to the state’s agricultural expansion with the introduction of some of the latest technologies for growing and maintaining crops.  A key focus of the AgTech hub is robotics, including an expansion of drones for precision agriculture to boost the state’s farm yields.

A dozen of the state’s universities are involved in some fashion in the consortium, which also links to a separate “Drone Port USA” hub in the eastern part of the state. Drone Port USA is intended to stimulate drone progress across numerous sectors of the Kentucky economy.  In the short term, it could help transform the Bluegrass State into an even larger producer of soybeans, corn and chicken, but also make Kentucky a global leader in a wide array of state-of-the-art agricultural technologies.

Kentucky still has a long way to go to catch up with other US states on the cutting edge of the burgeoning drone industry.  But the investments being made now will soon pay enormous dividends and will likely inspire other states, especially those in the Deep South, to explore what drones can do for them.

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