Drone for the farm?

Narrator: Before we jump in, a quick reminder that we publish our premium podcast, 19 Minutes, 3 times a month on the 9th, 19th, and 29th. It's a short, focused update designed to help you think ahead and make faster, clearer decisions. You can subscribe using the link in the description. Thanks.

Shay

Foulk: Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. Today, Shay Foulk with Matt Hatcher. Matt, how are you today?

Matt

Hatcher: Good, good. Getting a little rain here in northeast Iowa, but overall it's not been bad so far this winter.

Shay

Foulk: We're recording in early March of 2026. It's almost 70 degrees here in northwest Illinois. Birds are singing. We had the first robins come in the other day and getting itchy for fieldwork. Wanted to have a conversation with you around drone application. I don't know how well drones fly in the snowy weather that you guys have had here over the last couple of months, but Maybe some drone work going to be going on here pretty soon, huh?

Matt

Hatcher: Yeah, no, it's very timely too. If you're thinking of getting into the drone industry or getting one for your farm, getting through the compliance piece of it, you know, now is a good time to start because it does take time. It's not something that you submit your waivers and your applications to the FAA and they instantly turn around the next day and send them back to you. So it's very timely that if you were trying to start a business, now would be the time you'd want to be getting after it.

Shay

Foulk: And, and how do they say that? The best and worst thing about government is how slow it moves, something like that. But yeah, when, uh, when did you get into the drone side of the business, Matt?

Matt

Hatcher: So right about 3 years ago from now, um, right around the end of the fiscal— right around the end of the year there, we just decided, uh, we're gonna get in it, bought some drones and, uh, started all the compliance paperwork, testing and everything. And backing up a little bit, the year before we actually had hired 2 different applicators to come in and spray for us just so we could see how it worked in our fields, our environment. Northeast Iowa up here is very hilly, rough, rugged terrain. We're right on the Mississippi River bluffs in the Driftless region. So we have big terraces and not level fields like they do about 40 minutes to the south of us or to the west of us here. So we wanted to see kind of how the technology would work out on the acres here in Northeast Iowa before we jumped in with 2 feet.

And yeah, it, Both of the guys we had come fly for us, we were very impressed with, and I decided to go ahead and purchase 2 drones and we built a trailer. And yeah, we're still flying a couple of the drones we purchased the first year. This would be going on the 3rd season of them. So we upgraded a few, we've grown a little bit, we learned a lot, made some mistakes along the way. I could probably tell you the dos and don'ts better than when I jumped into it.

Shay

Foulk: So what convinced you? I mean, from watching the drone application, obviously it's pretty hot and heavy there. I'll call it '22, '23 into '24. What convinced you that, hey, this is a value proposition we need to get into?

Matt

Hatcher: Yeah, so a lot of it up here in northeast Iowa, it's always helicopter-based up in this area, just from the terrain we have, the trees, the timber edges, the not-square fields, odd-shaped fields. So the transition from a drone to helicopter is probably a little easier than from an airplane, just from that standpoint, just because the terrain really lent itself to doing it. And when you saw the technology and how well they followed the ground, how well they applied the product out on the plants and the efficiency that they had gained in the last, like I say, this has been '23, '22 we jumped in, the efficiency they gained in the years prior really was impressive. They went from 5, 6-gallon drones up to 10, 12, even 13.

So the tanks are getting there, the battery technology was getting there where you're not just doing a couple acres for a pass, you know, you're getting that 5, 6, 7 acres per pass or per trip with the drone. And it really became commercially feasible for us when you're looking at the helicopter rates compared to what we could do it ourselves. And then it allowed us to get into that timing window that we wanted. And some of the applicators in different areas are tied to a certain ag retailer. So it allowed us to also source some of our own chemicals, maybe at a better value proposition as well.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, that's awesome. So the dollars made sense. The terrain lent itself to making sense. And I'm sure you found just continued benefits there. I mean, like you said, the chemical purchasing, the timeliness of application, I know is one of the big ones, is when you decide that you want to go out and do it, you can go out and do it. Now, Ken, this is a question that I have because I know people always, like in ground rigs, there's a lot of guys that want to go out and spray at night when you kind of have the right humidity and temperatures. Can you do that with drones, or is that not a no-go?

Matt

Hatcher: No, it's absolutely okay. There's a You have to have, as you go through your process of getting certified, you'll learn kind of the things the FAA says you have to do to do that. You have to have a strobe light on the drone that can be seen up to 3 statute miles away. You do have to have an additional Class 3 Airman's medical certification to do that. With most exemptions today, that's kind of the way it's set up. But yeah, we can go at night if we need to. So a lot of times, you know, we've done that in the past where the wind picks up in the afternoon or it starts getting up warm, you know, that upper 80s, and we just shut down until it cools off in the evenings and go again and get into the evening a little bit. But it is legal to do as long as you follow the proper steps.

Shay

Foulk: Now talk to me a little bit about the flight mapping that occurs with the drones. How much are you physically flying versus their terrain following, you know, sensor capabilities there? Because at night, you know, and I'm using that as an example, I'm not saying that's something that you guys do frequently, but You know, at night it seems like, man, I don't want to be flying into these hills in northeast Iowa. So talk to me about what that looks like.

Matt

Hatcher: So most, I mean, most of the drones are either using a millimeter wavelength radar or a LiDAR system for its obstacle avoidance and detection of the crop canopy or the ground. So you're setting your feet basically, for example, 12 to 14 feet typically off the crop canopy. And that radar is actually following the ground. So when you come up to a field, The controller will have, you'll have an, if you have an internet connection out there, which most of the time you do, I prefer to use Starlink just because the Northeast Iowa with our hills, we tend to lose cell service in spots. My guys use hotspots as well. But you bring in basically a Google Map on the background image of the field. And as long as the field looks relatively the same, on our fields, we trust that Google Map image.

If I have some fields I know that are out of date, or we did a bunch of dirt work to, or maybe did some terracing, I could put up a small drone. Like my little Mavic, go map the field, take it back to the office, render the images, make boundaries just like you would for your planter, sprayer, any of your ground rigs, and we can import it then into our drone system. So you got a couple different options there. Most, I'd say probably 90% of the guys are just using the Google Map, touching the boundaries on the edge of the field. That gives you the drone's parameters, and then you can tell the drone how to enter and exit that field from where you're at. And its way in and out from the tender. And it'll lay out the best fit kind of back and forth. Think of it as an AB line right now. Some of them are doing some like headland passes or circle tracks.

Some of them you can actually do like a boundary and you put like, you could put spray zones in there, like no spray zones, no fly zones in a field. So if there's a cellular tower in the field, we can box that out so we don't fly around it. If there's a tree in the middle of the field, you can box that out so you don't fly around. If there's a big waterway, You can take that out so the drone will fly over it but not spray. Yeah. So there's different things you could do within setting up that field. And day or night, it doesn't really seem— it doesn't matter because it's using either the LiDAR or the radar for the ground sensing. And so you give it its parameters, the speed, the width, the rate, and the height. And it does— lays out its path and does all the math in the background and gives you your— if you're used to an auto-track, you know, your AB lines in the field, so to speak.

And it goes out and executes the mission. And if everything's going smoothly, you're just there tendering and monitoring at that point, you know, filling and swapping batteries.

Shay

Foulk: So on that LiDAR, a question that I have on that is, is it recording geospatial data so that the next time you go back it has more predictive analytics on it, or does it not have those capabilities currently?

Matt

Hatcher: Nope. So some of the earlier models, Shay, did not do that. The newer models, yeah, they are. So the models kind of starting at the end of last year, you saw that they're actually doing that now. They're remembering the, I'll call it the terrain of the field. And so, and they're even looking at a little bit off to the side for what the next pass is gonna be. And so the first pass, maybe it has to slow down for a terrace or slow down a little bit for a waterway or something rough. But then the next pass, the next pass, the next pass gets better and better and better as it learns the terrain it's in. So there is some of that learning built into some of the newer models of drones.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, well, and that's where I think, you know, you and I were talking offline about the LiDAR capabilities. I know a lot of firms are using it for, timber management or mining or real estate development, city, city waterworks, you know, public geospatial marking of some of those items. I think, you know, if you had the ability to upload that geospatial LiDAR map, that that would be really beneficial. And I also know that some of the ground rigs, I think, you know, the Horsch units had talked about having the ability to do it so that you had predictive boom flex raise kind of, you know, when you get out into the the Palouse and the western US where you have real hills, not any offense to northeast Iowa, but you know, where you have, where you have this major terrain changes that it would be a little bit more predictive. So I, you know, I think that's kind of fascinating.

As far as the other multispectral goes, I know there's everything from infrared, we mentioned thermal, we have LiDAR. What other multispectral information is being recorded there that's useful, or how else are you seeing some of those systems be utilized, Matt?

Matt

Hatcher: Yeah, so on the spray drones themselves, right currently today, they're not gathering any other information other than the application that's being done. There is a camera on there, just as you fly through the field, you can view it, but it's not currently really recording anything or taking any data. If we want to do any of the advanced sensing technology, you're looking at getting a drone, for example, a Mavic M, 3M would be a multispectral drone that give you your NDVI and your, you know, you give your RGB, your normal picture camera, plus it has 4 additional lenses on there for that multispectral. So if you want to take it into your software then and run like an NDVI across it or something like that to get that, you can. But currently today, the spray drones aren't doing that. That's still on your smaller drones, or you can get, I'll call this medium-sized drone.

Some people would be a big one, but probably a drone in that 10-pound range would carry a bigger payload, maybe a more expensive camera to do that work as well. But most of the people I've seen have done it with a smaller drone like the Mavic or a drone in that size.

Shay

Foulk: So the NDVI, the visual imaging there, you know, obviously they have NDVI data from satellite images. I have not gotten a sense in the industry that we are maybe yet at the point where we're getting enough useful data out of it. Is that an accurate assessment?

Matt

Hatcher: I would agree. I always say you can give all the data you want, but you got to have an actionable item out of it. So I think— and I think I've seen that too in the industry. There's— the NDVI industry really blew up here, I'd say the 2010s, you know, mid-2010s. And then now it seems like it's almost shrunk back down and there's less manufacturers of those sensors, at least for the onboard. Of drones. I've had two useful case scenarios here in the last 6 months, I would say, that is showing some promise that I think is going to be interesting. And both of them have actually been on the organic side of the business. One of them, the customer is looking at, can they go out and map a field and predict and see the weed spectrum in the field so they can send hand crews out to just certain areas of the field to really maximize their efficiencies with that.

And another one's working on a pasture management strategy using that technology. So I think in those higher value crops, you'll see a return on that quicker than you probably will in the, in the corn and soybean market today. But I think that's usually where those things tend to start. And then as people anymore develop software or find uses for it, it'll trickle probably down into more what we're doing maybe in the commercial grains business.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, no, that's awesome. Anything else on the imaging, the multispectral, the data collection maybe that we haven't hit on before I switch gears here, Matt?

Matt

Hatcher: No, and a lot of those drones are getting— they're not cheap to do. And I still have a Mavic drone we throw up in the air without the NIR sensors or any of the LiDAR. And we'll map fields for boundary creation for the big drones or the spray drones. Or even we look for— we do some non-GMO beans and stuff, and we'll send them up to find weed escapes. And we can map those pockets so we can come back in with the big drones later on to manage some of those weed areas. So there's still a use for those drones and that mapping software, even on the RGB spectrum or just the regular camera. So we sell them and we service them. And like I say, I've got one that's not all that fancy, but I do use it quite a bit in the summertime for those scenarios.

Shay

Foulk: Now, are you using DroneDeploy for that or a different program?

Matt

Hatcher: So when I'm flying it, it's a DJI drone, so it's actually using the DJI software for the flight mapping. And I use— there's a couple different drone deploys. One that is out there, you can do the stitching and putting the photos together with. I use one called Pix4D, is one I've been very satisfied with. And it does a few other things for you. You could get some of your— it does some simulated NDVI maps and things like that. I haven't really played with it too much. Mainly we use it for boundary creation. In the zone creation and things of that nature. But the nice thing about that one is you don't need to be connected to a cloud to use it all the time. I could take that in my pickup truck while I'm flying fields and start rendering images on my laptop right there.

Shay

Foulk: So, and I'll say just for the listeners and, you know, buyer beware type deal is there are certain drones that can run DroneDeploy software and certain ones that can't. So we had it 3 years ago already we had a windstorm go through and the insurance company was backed up. They weren't going to be to our place for a couple of weeks. So I overnight drop shipped the drone and put it up in the air, took pictures from the wind and hail damage that we had, and they actually used that for the insurance. And then I came back in and did it right before harvest to have a secondary adjustment. And they were, you know, they were happy. I was happy. They still came out and ground checked it. But you know how that corn, when you get wind damage, it'll stand back up. And then one, it's hard to walk through and get a good assessment.

And two, it looks so different in 3 days after a windstorm than when it did when it was originally out there. So it helped them kind of spot-check those areas a little bit better. And that paid for itself immediately. And I wasn't doing anything fancy. My problem was I didn't buy one that was compatible with the drone deploy. I bought the DJI Mavic 3. And it, you know, so Lesson learned there, I guess. It, you know, it's sitting over here, paid for itself, but just one of those things, I guess. There's probably other little nuances like that that people should be thinking about too, I'm sure.

Matt

Hatcher: And unfortunately, I've learned some of those lessons the hard way, like you just mentioned there, Shay, as well. And you brought up a good example there. I had a neighbor's cows get loose in my cornfield one year, and that I put the drone up with the insurance agent there that day too, and we were able to get a pretty good estimate of where, you know, the damage that had been done. So it's there's definitely more opportunities out there than probably what we just think of off the cuff.

Shay

Foulk: I think they call that regenerative agriculture, Matt. Yeah, livestock back. So, hey, I did want to talk a little bit about the serviceability because I mentioned I got my drone sitting right across from me here. Well, I accidentally crashed into a tree, which happens, and, you know, had a motor go out in it. And the wiring really isn't that complex. You know, there's 3 wires that go to it, a little bit of soldering that needs done. But the serviceability, that's kind of what I wanted to ask about. I know for a fact that you can go in, take an engine apart, put it back together on, you know, any of these big pieces of equipment. But working on a drone, it's a little bit different. It's more maybe more surgical or maybe more of an electrical outlook. Talk to listeners about what they can expect there or how to think about the servicing side.

Matt

Hatcher: Yeah, I just got done with the farm show here and a lot of people asked me, you know, what are the maintenance on these and what is the service like on them, especially on the bigger spray drones. The nice thing is when you're dealing with that little, that smaller drone, that Mavic, that mapping drone, yeah, the wires are soldered in, they're pretty small. On the bigger drones, they're more of a heavy-duty connector, you know, screwed together, things of that nature, because the wires are obviously bigger. But when it comes to just daily maintenance on them, you know, daily, you know, we, I'm a firm believer if you take good care of them, they'll take good care of you. So we scrub ours every night with just a kind of a soapy water, you know, Dawn dish soap and water, hose them off. Rinse out the inside of the tanks. There's a screen that kind of helps protect the pumps.

We pull that out, rinse it out, put the screen back in, put a little ammonia in the water, a couple, you know, a cup of ammonia in a gallon of water or two, run that through the pumps and the lines at the end of the day just to— typically, you know, we're doing a lot of fungicide applications. It just keeps that fungicide from, you know, sitting in there and kind of building up over the day or night. And that really does a good job. I mean, really the big moving parts you have on the drone itself, are the motors where they're spinning and the pumps. That's really the only moving parts. Everything else is pretty static. So it's just inspecting, making sure, you know, you don't have nicks and chips in your blades, you don't see anything in the structure of the drone that could be damaged. It's really just a visual inspection.

And we feel that, you know, scrubbing them every night when we're done, we give them that really good visual inspection because you're going over everything with a brush and kind of eyeing it. And it makes them last longer. I've got drones we've flown for, 3 years and got over 10,000 acres on, and they, they look really well, they look really good. And, you know, I've gone in and done some bearings on some motors just preventatively. Depending on the drone brand, some of them have peristaltic pumps versus an impeller-type pump. And, you know, we want to replace those bands once a year just to be safe, you know, just kind of more preventative maintenance. The biggest, if you're talking gearhead maintenance, is your generators. Changing oil, checking oil, um, just like you would in a, in your truck.

You know, your generators are your fuel source out there, so, um, they're putting the fuel in the, in the batteries you need to fly. So taking care of your generators is actually probably more on the daily maintenance side, from checking oil, making sure, you know, changing oil regularly and servicing those than the drones themselves. Um, but yeah, talk to me a little bit about warranty there.

Shay

Foulk: Um, you know, is it a 1-year warranty, 2-year? How do you think about that from an ownership perspective?

Matt

Hatcher: Uh, so the warranty varies a lot by manufacturer. Um, that— and I don't want to get all the political side of things with the China and everything here lately and the way things have gone there, but, uh, in the past, I mean, all our drones are built in China. There's just no really way around it. There's been only really one US manufacturer, um, and probably 95% of the market has been China. Um, truth be told, getting warranty and stuff through some of that has been a challenge, just getting approvals and, uh, getting back, you know, and things like that. So, and their warranties haven't been necessarily the most clear all the time on what they have been. Now, I'd say some of the manufacturers here in the last year have really improved that. But each component could have a different warranty.

So like the drone itself, the— I'll call it the mainframe, the arms, things like that, the non-moving components, structural might be a year, the batteries might be a year and so many charging cycles, pumps could be so many acres. You know, it really depends on which drone and each manufacturer. It's not kind of the 336 you're used to in the auto industry. Each manufacturer kind of has its own thing on each individual component almost. And so it's a good question to ask as you're buying a drone. One of the manufacturers we've been working with here that we're really pleased with, they spelled it all out up front with us and they have every component listed in the acres or hours that component is under warranty.

Shay

Foulk: How about insurance? It seems like insurance might look at this sideways and I'm sure everybody's handling that a little bit differently too.

Matt

Hatcher: Yep. So the biggest shock to me when I started in this business was the price tag on insurance. Um, and it's— there's the chemical liability side of it, and then there's the, uh, I'll call it the collision insurance or the comprehensive type policy, and then just general business insurance. And if you throw an auto in there, um, the— I just— truth being told, I know a lot of guys with a 2-drone setup By the time you get your chemical liability, your— if you do any kind of a collision or comprehensive on that drone itself, and then you do, you know, a trailer, if you build a trailer, you have any, or just general business insurance, you're probably looking in that $8,000 to $16,000, $17,000 depending upon where it's at. Typically what I've seen is each drone's in that $2,500 to $3,500 per year for chemical liability. Um, after you get so many drones, they kind of discount it.

But if you're just— most guys are 2, 3 drone fleets, um, you're probably talking that $2,500 to $3,500 per drone just for the chemical liability. And then the general rule of thumb is for every dollar you're insuring, or every— it's 10% of every dollar you insure for like a comprehensive. So if you're insuring a $35,000 drone, it'd be $3,500. Um, that's changed a little bit, come down maybe a little bit this year, but The last 2, 3 seasons, that's kind of been a general rule of thumb. So one drone, if you had a $40,000 drone out there, you know, at $3,000 of chemical liability, plus if you insured it for the full $40,000, you know, you're sitting there at, you know, about $7,500 in insurance, just for a rough number there, Shay. So, and then if you do any business liability on top of it, it's, uh, that was probably the biggest shock to me, uh, going into that that I didn't anticipate.

Shay

Foulk: Oh yeah, because you got errors and emissions, no different than any other chemical applicator, but now you're bigger area, more spaces, maybe even more of a perception of liability there, whether that's the reality or not. I would, you know, my experience has been with the folks that I know that are doing drone applications is they're doing it safely. They're very stringent on the rules. They don't want to be out there flying when it's 35-mile-an-hour winds. So they're not going to go spray, you know, whereas the ground rig might keep rolling from the co-op or whoever. Not picking on anybody, that's just a reality.

Matt

Hatcher: Yep, no, I agree. It's a— and the risk factors, I feel, pretty limited because they know that drone's geo-fenced into a certain area once you set it up. And, you know, not to say things can't go haywire, something could go bad, but most often if it's going to crash, it's going to be in a cornfield or in a— in somewhere like a tree or a power line is probably the biggest. Power lines seem to be the biggest culprit of drones, I would say, that I've seen and heard of.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, now it seems like for some of these other uses, um, you mentioned pasture briefly earlier. I know a lot of folks that are doing spot spraying or just even the ability to go out, take care of some noxious weeds out there. You had mentioned offline here, as these capacities get larger, maybe even some opportunities to do some fertilizing. We have some helicopter services around here I know that spray for honeysuckle and timbers when you get late into the season and all your other fall leaf foliage has gone away. Do you think, do you think that's a continued area of development that there's a huge demand for? Because you kind of have a lot of both up where you're located.

Matt

Hatcher: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think most people think of the drones and you think fungicide season's kind of your, your big one. And that's your prime window. That's definitely is kind of where the where most people are focusing and probably rightfully so. There's probably the biggest ROI from a drone operator on that potential area. But in the off-season or in the not fungicide window, as these drones continue to grow, I mean, currently today we've got drones, you know, that'll carry up to 330 pounds of capacity. So you could go out and, for example, fertilize a pasture, you know, and some of those pastures are pretty rough or there might be wet areas in there. So you can, You know, you get in there where maybe you can't get a ground rig across the creek or something like that to get to it, you know, and that's where the drones really excel.

And you can get them into some tighter places that maybe an airplane or a helicopter would struggle to get into. So still got to be careful with them, still got to, you know, make sure you don't hit a tree or anything. But yeah, I think as these drones continue to get more lift and more advanced in how they're working, that opportunity is there. I look at, you know, even in our side, I can get out there maybe in instead of June and get out there in mid-June now and maybe even do some side dressing in corn if I can lift 300, 400 pounds, put on 80 pounds an acre of a urea or something like that, of a treated urea or AMS urea blend in the corn where in Northeast Iowa or other hilly areas, if you try to get into the field that time of year, you'd run over a lot of corn just sliding down the hill. So pasture is the same way.

And herbicide treatment in pastures, I've talked to, we've done some and gotten really good early thistle control by getting out there before, you know, a ground rig with 120-foot boom doesn't always fit in a pasture, especially in northeast Iowa. So, um, there's a lot of opportunities there to work on that. And I, I, we don't do a ton of it on our own just because we farm as well and tend to be busy that time of year. But I've got a lot of customers that work with us that do, and, and they have really good success with the pasture work in the early spring.

Shay

Foulk: So The last thing I kind of want to hit on here as we wrap up, and if anything else pops into mind that we didn't hit, don't hesitate to say something. But what I've heard from a lot of people is drone application is not glamorous work. Your setup can dictate tremendously how your day goes. You know, you're out in the sun, you're swapping batteries, you're refilling every 3 minutes potentially if you got a couple of drones rolling. I mean, Sounds like there's a lot of work that goes into it. Am I off base there, or how have you mitigated some of that, or how do you think about that when you talk with the folks that you work with that are interested in purchasing drones?

Matt

Hatcher: Yeah, you're right, Shane. It's sunup to sundown or beyond some days. We talked about night flight earlier. You know, it's hot, it's summertime, the middle of a cornfield in July, the humidity's, I think if you can get above 100%, it's there, you know. We've flown at night and the controllers and everything just have water beating on them. I mean, it can be pretty uncomfortable and swampy at times. But the biggest thing I tell people and the way when I talk about this, your tender unit that you have for your drones can make or break you. It can really help you in efficiencies. It can really help you with comfort and ease of how you operate. It's a huge piece of your operation. And as we go forward here, like I always tell people too, one of the things I did when we built ours 3 years ago, I didn't think ahead far enough. And we're running 2 drones off of there.

We added wings to it. We've done all the things we can. I didn't probably put big enough axles under it. I didn't get a heavy enough trailer. So now as we look to expand into these drones that are going from a 13 red gallon range up to a 20 or 30 gallon range and the size of them is growing, I'm gonna outgrow my trailer because I need a diesel generator, a bigger diesel generator now, a heavier one. To keep up with the batteries, you know. So it's— you really start to think ahead on that. Their thing is you could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in some of these really fancy drone trailers, and if you can do that and it fits in your business, it's great. They got air-conditioned flight operation areas that go up and down on hydraulic lifts and everything else, but your ROI is probably going to drop quite a bit doing that. So I say it can break you in more than one way.

It can break you physically, it can also break you financially, I think, on some of these tenders we see out there. But if that's in your budget and that's what you want to do, I think that's good. I think down the road in the future and some of the concepts I've seen and heard, we're going to end up, you know, I got a Roomba vacuum at home that could pull up on its own little pad, charge itself, and suck the dust and dirt out and into a little vacuum bag, right? These things are going to land on a pod. They're going to charge themselves. They're going to refill themselves. And at first, you know, the FAA is probably going to say we have to be there and be air traffic control for them, so to speak. But down the road, I think it could even become autonomous where you're just moving 2 or 3 trailers a day and getting the trailers into position and they're doing their job. Yeah.

I think that technology's coming and it's probably gonna be here before we, you know, think it will be. Just, I remember 10 years ago I said I didn't think I'd ever see an autonomous tractor in my lifetime and now they're out there pulling tillage and stuff. So it's coming and it's gonna come fast. And so start thinking about, you know, when you're sizing up tenders and things like that, potentially, how is this going to change in the future? How is my business? Am I going to go from one drone to two drones, or am I going to stay, you know, go to bigger drones and need more battery capability? But, um, that's my biggest regret when I first started, was not probably building my tender as big as I should have, or the right size for the next setup.

Shay

Foulk: So I'm going to ask you a difficult question here, and, and that's intentional. Someone that's looking at buying a drone, how many acres do they need to have to run through a drone that makes sense, you know, that's going to have a 2 to 3 year payoff that is worth the liability risk and the insurance and the time that they're going to have into it? What do you see as either an acre? And then I'm sure your follow-up will be, well, what's your ROI? But answer intuitively, I guess.

Matt

Hatcher: Yeah, I say, what's your fields? How do they lay out? How many acres a day can you get done? There's a lot of variables there that Example, northeast Iowa here, right where I sit, we get with the two drones 500 to 600 acres a day done. I go out an hour west of here, we got some fields and we get 1,000 acres a day done. So that's a little— there is some subjectivity to that depending upon where you're at. But kind of what I've seen in the drone space, if you're going to be trying to do a commercial, you really need to be looking at getting 3,000 to 6,000 acres in the fungicide window through that drone. Anything you do outside that window is kind of icing on top of the cake. Typically with the two drones we've had, we've been in that 8,000 to 11,000 fungicide acres a year.

And then we pick up some cover crops in the August, late August, September timeframe and kind of patch those things in on top. But to really make it probably to get a decent return on that investment and to get your time. And then it's going to depend too on rate, you know, like out in Central Iowa here, guys, They're only charging $10 to $12 an acre up here in the hills, just because we don't have the productivity. We need to be probably closer to that $14 to $16 an acre. And it's some real nasty— and like when we're doing pasture work, we do it on an hourly basis just because it's usually slower and more intricacies to it. Or if we're doing some spot spray work, it's usually hourly based. So can't just blanket do everything at one rate. Cover crops, I have a a base rate up to 25 pounds, and anything above that, every 3 pounds above that, I charge an extra dollar an acre.

Narrator: Okay.

Matt

Hatcher: Just because it's, you know, more trips in and out from the tender, more time, things of that nature in that business. So that's what I found has worked well for me. And I think, you know, that's kind of where you need to be, is in that 3,000 to 6,000 acres per drone. And it depends on the size of drone you have. There's different price points on drones and tenders and everything else too. Yeah.

Shay

Foulk: So we didn't hit on the COVID crops and someone's going to throw something at me if I don't say something about it. So what have you seen that works cover crop related? You know, we always talk seed to soil contact and moisture. That's the balance that you have with the drones, obviously. But what have you liked or what's something that you were maybe surprised by on the COVID crop side?

Matt

Hatcher: The thing I probably learned doing it the last few years is If you could time it before a rain is the best. Do you want to try to get it in in that 3 to 4 days before a rain window? If you could do that, we've had pretty good success. And we've run blends anywhere from as low as 18 pounds per acre all the way up to 55, 60 pounds per acre. You know that some guys just want a bushel of rye put out there and that's what they want to put out there. And we've done that. Some guys really try to maximize the amount of seeds they can get, you know, working with some smaller seeds for, you know, smaller seeds. So you have more seeds per pound and really trying to, you know, get down to that 18, 15, 20-pound rate and more blends with like some clovers and brassicas and things of that nature. What I've seen, corn, get it in probably at least in our neck of the woods up here late August.

Get it in. Beans when they just start turning kind of turning brown and dropping leaves is a good time to get in beans. I'm kind of gun-shy because I don't want a 4-inch carpet of stuff out there trying to get in the sickle when I'm combining beans either. So I think there's maybe a little bit more of a risk tolerance there a little bit on the bean side. But the corn, we did some work last year. The guy put some oats and rye blend out and some clover blend. We did it pretty early and he grazed it post and it turned out to be a really, really nice cover for him.

Shay

Foulk: Is it green enough yet or not yet?

Matt

Hatcher: Not up here. We're still got quite a bit of frost in the ground here yet and we're, we're not quite green up. The lawn just maybe has a tinge of it here and there, but we're probably We'll see what this rain does tonight, if it pushes some frost out and where we end up, but not quite yet up in northeast Iowa.

Shay

Foulk: That's just where the dog took a leak.

Matt

Hatcher: That's where you get the little extra nitrogen up here. Yeah.

Shay

Foulk: Okay, so I want to wrap up here. You're doing the drone application through Hatcher Farms LLC. That's your side of the business. And then also involved with Terraplex Great River. Talk to me a little bit about what all you guys are doing there. And if anybody listening is interested in the drone service, how you may be able to help assist them.

Matt

Hatcher: Yep. So we pretty much talked a lot through the application side. So on the sales and service side with the Terraplex, yeah, we signed up with them to be a dealer about a year ago. I purchased my drones through Terraplex. They're based out in Odebolt, Iowa. They've excellent service for us, did an excellent job of supporting us, developed a really good relationship with them, and just one thing led to another and We kind of came to an agreement to become a dealer over here on the eastern side of the state for them. So been learning our first year kind of how to work through some of the dealer channels, marketing and things like that. Got some drones sold and out there supporting customers. The big thing we really try to hang our hat on, or, you know, our name to claim to fame is really supporting the customer. We're farmers, we're applicators.

We know what we want to be able to help the farmer and the— or the applicator get in the business and be successful. So support's a big one. If you buy a drone from us, I'm not just going to ship it to you and drop it off. I'm going to deliver it. We're going to spend a day going over it before the season gets there. I want you to be hands-on with it. I want you to learn. If you've never flown a drone before, I'm bringing a little Mavic. We're going to fly it around your yard. I'll let you crash it if you need to, to figure out how to run them and teach you. We could put a set of blades on that for $20 versus a couple hundred on a big drone. So Really, we want to be hands-on with the training. We've got an internal compliance person with our connection through Teraplex that can help walk you through the FAA paperwork side of it.

We can advise you through the state testing and help you get down that road. Sam, our internal compliance guy, is a wizard at this. He makes the easy button, so to speak. You still have to take your test, but he handles the rest of it for you and it makes it very seamless.

Shay

Foulk: So one thing, one thing we didn't hit on there that I just thought of is I know some guys have had issues with like software updates. You'll get a software update and it'll be worse than what it was before and you got to revert back or you hate how it is until they get the bugs fixed out. How have you navigated that?

Matt

Hatcher: I mean, I, I luckily have been around a lot of software in agriculture pretty much my whole life. If we're in the middle of season and it's not broken, don't— I'm a firm believer, just leave it go till we're done with the season. Yeah. But if something does come up, the nice thing is we, with the Terraplex and the dealer network there, we've got a wide enough bandwidth that we we usually catch wind if something is going on. So for example, this time of year down in February, they've had custom crews down in Texas running, and they know crews down in Texas running. So we can see if, you know, they find any bugs in any software or if there's been any issues with the drones this early. And hopefully by then we know, okay, this software version's been really, really good, uh, this software version maybe has this hiccup or this problem.

Um, in the past with obviously a lot of these drones coming out of China, maybe the software updates weren't as fast as we wanted. With some of the newer manufacturers now becoming more US-focused and more based, we're hoping we can see those software updates come down in time. Yeah. And we won't be waiting 6 months for an update. Maybe we can get it done in 3, 4 weeks. Yeah.

Shay

Foulk: So very cool. Okay, Matt. So, and I want to put a plug in for you guys because I really liked what you said there about the service. We've worked with your operations there for several years and can't speak highly enough about what you guys do. So for any of you listening, if you're interested in the drones, if you think it's a fit for your business, you want to get into it for your farm operation, you know, contact Matt, reach out to these guys. Matt, what's the best way for them to do that?

Matt

Hatcher: Yeah, you could go to our website, terraplexgreatriver.com. We've got a request service link or request a consultation link on there. You can email us terraplexgreatriver@gmail.com. You could call or text me, uh, 563-880-6815. Um, we'd be glad to get a hold of you and walk you through the process, give you a demo. You know, we can bring— we got drones here, we can bring them out, show you how to run them, how we run them. Um, we really want to be— get you as hands-on with them. And the biggest thing is we want you to be successful with them, whether it's The drone, you buy just drone from us, you buy a tender. We really want you to be successful. We give a lot of different options that most companies don't give by carrying multiple brands, just because I don't think one trailer or one drone fits what everybody wants to do.

What I might want to do is different than what you would do down where you're at there, Shay. I mean, I could hook you up with a 30-foot trailer down there in Illinois and you could get around everywhere. Northeast Iowa, we got fields you got to go through timber roads or creek bottoms and stuff to get to. So Everywhere's got its own unique challenges and we just want to be able to fit as many needs as we can. We're farmer-based. Terraplex is a farmer-owned company and that's really our focus is on farmers and on the farm industry and ag industry.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, the drones aren't going away. You know, you learn how to run tillage, you learn how to feed cattle, you learn how to run a sprayer. And I think drone is kind of the next frontier. So my parting thoughts, I guess, would be if you don't have something like a simple DJI Mavic, you know, get one of those, play around with it, take pictures, have it for wind and hail issues that we seem to get every year, you know, in some areas. Just, just get used to it and start to feel comfortable. So, Matt, I really appreciate the time. Thank you so much for the conversation.

Matt

Hatcher: Yeah, thanks, Shay. Appreciate it, and good luck in the upcoming growing season here.

Shay

Foulk: Thank you very much, and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. We will catch you next time.