“Precision” agriculture is emerging as a major commercial application for the burgeoning US drone industry.  By targeting the application of farm inputs to soil and crops with the highest prospective yield, farmers can reduce their resource and labor costs, boost production and maximize their profits.  Field labor is difficult to recruit and expensive to employ, and gas-powered road vehicles, crop dusters and helicopters burn fuel and leave a large carbon footprint.  Drones can perform the same work faster, cleaner and more accurately.  For an industry continually besieged by droughts, fungi and foreign competition, drones offer a brand new competitive edge.

But it’s taken a while for the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates the use of all US airspace, to catch up with the pace of technology.  Just this year, the FAA issued its first and only waiver to a US drone company to begin flying its state-of-the art precision agriculture drone nationwide.  The drone company, Guardian Agriculture, is piloting the use of its large multicopter drone on four farms in California’s Salinas Valley – one of the nation’s breadbaskets. It’s just the  beginning of what is likely to become a massive expansion of drone use in farming in the coming decade.

Drones aren’t completely new to US agriculture but to date, their primary use has been aerial mapping – not spraying – and their use limited to specific farms.  Drones equipped with advanced zoom and multispectral cameras can not only map a farm but also collect an enormous volume of detailed data on soil fertility and crop “stress” conditions.  This information is invaluable to farmers looking to avoid wasting expensive farm inputs while complying with increasingly strict environmental guidelines, especially on pesticide use.

But for the most part, it’s been left to traditional gas-powered vehicles and field workers to apply the drone data in the field.

Guardian Agriculture is one of the few firms that has devised the sophisticated technology to synchronize the drone’s onboard data-collection with an aerial spray operation that distributes farm inputs in the precise manner and amounts identified.  In theory, the inputs might be seeds or fertilizer, or even water but most likely, for now the emphasis is on pesticides.  Guardian’s flagship SC-1 drone is an enormous eVTOL with six overhead rotors, each about six feet in diameter.  The drone can cover up to 60 acres per hour, can carry a 200lb payload, and has a combined tank fill and supercharge time of less than 1 minute.  There’s simply nothing else like it on the market.

“This is a watershed moment for sustainable farming and a giant leap forward for eVTOL technology,” Guardian founder and CEO Adam Bercu said this week. “While several companies are developing eVTOL technologies, we are now the only one that has both secured FAA approval to operate commercially nationwide, and that’s actually started flying missions on behalf of paying customers.”

As a member of the FAA’s Integration Partnership Agreement, Guardian advises the agency on how to incorporate eVTOLs into the National Airspace System.  The six-year-old company has offices in Massachusetts and California and its leadership team includes engineering manufacturing leaders that previously held senior-level positions at Apple, BAE, Sikorsky, Tesla, and Uber.  Earlier this year, Guardian raised more than $20 million in new funding, bringing its cumulative investment thus far to $35 million.