Last week my colleague Mitch Solomon and I were privileged to be in the company of more than one thousand farmers in rural Decatur, IL, for the two-day Precision Aerial Agriculture Show 2014 (PAAS 2014). Mitch covers five key takeaways from the show in his post about the event – including the most salient one: There is no killer drone app for farmers – rather, drones are a tool with many apps and high ROI. In this post, I’ll give an accounting and analysis of the players in attendance that are supporting the market for drones in agriculture. Some were present, others were mentioned but weren’t present, and still others were surprisingly absent on all counts.
Bottom line
Regardless of which vendors attended or exhibited, here’s what you need to know with regard to the drones vendors serving or intending to serve the agriculture market:
- Most of the companies that serve this market are small businesses. It is clear they are working hard to learn firsthand what farmers want from small drones and in doing so are establishing networks of distributors and service providers that will lock other players out of the market.
- Manufacturers of small drones for precision agriculture are consolidating around DJI and 3DRobotics for their flight control and mission planning software – mainly because of functional maturity and low-cost.
- The large aerospace companies and Department of Defense (DoD) contract vendors do not have a presence in this market. Even though some have participated in agricultural academic studies, as a whole their products are unknown in the farming community. These vendors simply have not established the necessary relationships with growers, dealers, coops, agronomists, and local service providers. As a result, it’s probably too late for them to capture any significant U.S. agriculture market share.
Present and Accounted For
AgEagle – AgEagle had the enviable booth position just inside the show floor, which made it hard to ignore. Its purpose-built Ritewing Zephyr II fixed-wing flyer with uTHERE flight controller and Canon S100 camera goes for about US $12,500. The system comes with a catapult to get it in the air fast, where it will fly at 40 mph and cover approximately 600 acres in 30 minutes. A cloud-based aerial agronomic imagery solution is offered in partnership with MyAgCentral, a division of DN2K. This solution has a fully integrated workflow function that streamlines the process of flying fields and capturing, storing, processing, viewing, and sharing aerial images. For instance, ‘shape files’ can be imported into SMSTM Software for use with variable rate applicators. Information on that partnership can be found here.
Read more here: http://droneanalyst.com/2014/07/16/drone-tech-winners-and-losers-at-the-precision-aerial-ag-conference-2014/
Comments
I think it's way too early to make that assumption. The civilian UAV market is in its infancy. And when we were searching for our system it was tough just to get a call back from any of the companies as they have no sales/customer service. That's the issue with a market when it's new, it's run by engineers with no marketing experience.
I'd say it wouldn't be tough for Lockheed Martina and the like to penetrate. Not to mention Aeryon already has some customers in AG. I agree they're late to the party, but they could compete if they wanted.
Very nice write ups.
As a former employee of AeroVironment I agree that the big manufactures probably do not have much of a chance at this stage.
Thanks, good report.
Farmers will also support there own ahead of any outsider so any local kid who has a go will get jobs well ahead of a townie or interstate vulture. I envisage a few farmers sons will start local contract businesses much the same as for contract spraying and harvesting.
Blood and being known goes a long way in rural areas.
While this may sound like a negative its not any man who is prepared to take a loan on a $200000 sprayer or $500000 harvester will be more than up to buying in to quality UAV or RPAS systems if they can be proved to be functional and productive within a certain legislative environment.
this is why we need to spend as much time and input with our legislative bodies as we do with our technical R and D.
Farmers won't be buying systems en mass they will be buying data and they will buy the best cheapest data from the local kid that provides it and undercuts the rest. There will be very low margins in this market. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I met a chap with a manned Cessna, Lidar fitted that charges $1 a hectare for processed completed data. Think about that for a moment. His next job 70,000 hectares.
Thinking on price - that you probably only need a set of data once a month on the larger farms - therefore 20 farms could share one drone (leaving time for repairs etc). Putting the cost at less than $1000 each.
Good analysis Ultimately the larger companies will probably only contribute in adding air frames and production capacity for existing designs and concepts unless they can interact better with end users.
I believe the production of Ag planes took a similar direction with minor new players able to grow into major positions due to better focused development and interaction with base users rather than the DOD/military/airline lobbying approach.
There's a nice slow-mo of the launcher for the Trimble UX5 at 4:05
@BacklashRC - I believe it's Trimble's.
That is a sharp looking launcher. Does anyone know where information on its constuction can be found?
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