Drone Tech Winners and Losers at the Precision Aerial Ag Conference 2014

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.

My view is that we will start with the smaller innovators with small machines who will prove the concepts. As the concept becomes proven the economies of scale will click in and the proven designs may be upscaled with the expertise of larger manufacturers when required. This may no be necessary until we reach 200kg plus air frames. But this can not start until both the market and industry is operating at a steady rate and the FFA CAA or CASA have hard set leglisation that sets the scope of the RPS use. As for the price then air ag industry has shown that once we have the above conditions set it is more feasible to larger more productive equipmentto be used provided it is mobile and can active follow the sun and seasons for work. So ultimately a small professional fleet of superdrones costing 500k plus is highly likely.

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Comments

Colin Snow July 23, 2014 at 8:53pm

There's another good article on the show here; http://agrinews-pubs.com/Content/Default/Homepage-Rotating-Story/Ar...

Note the ROI on $50K and that most use is for crop scouting.
Colin Snow July 21, 2014 at 7:44pm

I appreciate your perspective. Thanks for the explanation. I get it. I'm a flyer and have both platforms, plus a bigger MK rig.

I've researched the precision ag market quite a bit and will be releasing a report in a month or so. But I have already written about whether the majority of will want to see more pertinent data here: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/film-or-farm-which-is-the-bigge.... The answer may surprise you.
Patrick Wells July 21, 2014 at 6:35pm

Scott is spot on with his reference to pertinent data.

Scott- what are your maturity issues with 3DR?
Scott Hiebert July 21, 2014 at 6:29pm

Thanks for clarifying Colin. I still however must disagree with the term "mature". as a UAV builder as well as a large farmer, I can tell you that DJI and 3DR platforms are not mature in any respect of the term. The bugs/unreliability of these company's software choices are what make me say that. And I have the broken pieces of UAV to prove it. ;) Also, the cast majority of farms will very soon tire of simple aerial video/pictures and the novelty of them, and will want to see more pertinent and valuable information such as higher quality multi/hyperspectral imaging.

And I don't mean to sound too critical, just voicing my opinion on the matter. But I did like how you covered this event, so don't take me wrong!
Colin Snow July 21, 2014 at 5:46pm

Thanks everyone for reading and commenting. @Scott - the context of "functionally mature" has to do with actual use - not number of features. See the article I reference in the beginning by Mitch Solomon. What we learned at this show is the vast majority of farmers are not looking for more functionality than these two platforms already provide - in fact most are quite excited just to be able look at a video from 100 ft above their fields.
Scott Hiebert July 19, 2014 at 2:37pm

Great perspective Ed. I guess the fact I'm running a unit with a Lockheed Martin Autopilot makes me feel that the DOD firms can get a hold of this market. Personally, I'm not of the mindset you can make a solid commercial unit for $1500 like everyone on DIYdrones seems to think you can. But then again, I also had a good laugh when the author of this article said DJI and 3DR are "functionally mature".
Ed Taunton July 19, 2014 at 2:28pm

My view is that we will start with the smaller innovators with small machines who will prove the concepts. As the concept becomes proven the economies of scale will click in and the proven designs may be upscaled with the expertise of larger manufacturers when required. This may no be necessary until we reach 200kg plus air frames. But this can not start until both the market and industry is operating at a steady rate and the FFA CAA or CASA have hard set leglisation that sets the scope of the RPS use. As for the price then air ag industry has shown that once we have the above conditions set it is more feasible to larger more productive equipmentto be used provided it is mobile and can active follow the sun and seasons for work. So ultimately a small professional fleet of superdrones costing 500k plus is highly likely.
Patrick Wells July 19, 2014 at 11:30am

I somewhat agree on the positioning.

The issue I see is that the price point has been set for the most part. I would guess that most of the big companies will not be interested in producing equipment at that level of pricing.
Scott Hiebert July 19, 2014 at 8:43am

Yes, I agree on that. The DOD vendors don't seem to understand that selling 1000x the volume means you can sell at a lower price. I've learned this with bluebird and some of the other vendors. No, farmers/AG industry will not spend $500,000 on a drone. They can afford half a million for other equipment, but there are better options for less.

That said, I don't think they're too late to capture market share, just not properly positioned.
Patrick Wells July 19, 2014 at 7:21am

I "just" left AV (last week)

I can tell you from first hand experience that's it's going to all boil down to price. These big companies have a lot of engineering R&D overhead that they have to pay for.

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