One Dublin man believes that spraying from a drone is a possibility in the future. Ian Kiely owns Ireland’s only agricultural spraying drone.

At the recent drone expo in the RDS, Ian talked the Irish Farmers Journal through the machine and his plans for the future.

The drone is 30kg at take-off weight. It is a multi-rotor octocopter (eight blades). In its current format, due to size and weight, you need special permission to fly it.

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It was originally built by a Chinese company. However, they have redesigned it and rebuilt it twice with new landing gear, improved communications system and replaced many of the original components with higher quality ones.

It is capable of autonomous flight and carries a HD camera on board so the operator can see what it is doing. It is capable of delivering a 10l liquid payload from six adjustable nozzles. The operator can control the flow from the ground. It can be pre-programmed to avoid obstacles on farms.

Eventually, Ian would like it to have a mapping system with sense-and-avoid technology on board.

Crop-sensing equipment

Ian sees that in the future, a drone similar to this could take off from a farmyard and survey the crops on the farm using the latest crop-sensing equipment. If it finds any areas in need of spraying, it would return to a loading station, fill with spray and return to treat the area. All this would be done autonomously.

While there may be a future for this type of drone to maybe control outbreaks of dangerous weeds in remote areas and maybe for the control of very small areas in crops of nuisance weeds such as blackgrass, it currently is illegal to spray any chemicals from the air in Europe, so that day still is some way off.