FlyDronAir CEO Pedro Lucas in an image provided by the company.
Pedro Lucas (28 years old) can’t remember what his first drone was, but he remembers what he felt while flying it. “I love it. I thought it would change us, that we could transport things, see the world differently, be better at health emergencies, fight fires… what I guess I didn’t imagine is that I would advocate myself and that I would devote myself to the sector”. The general director of FlyDronAir answers between services on EL PAÍS while moving drones between farms together with the operations manager David Blanco (30 years old). They are together with the marketing manager María Martínez (33 years old alt) FlyDronAir, the company that is part of StartUPV’s incubation and acceleration program.
It all started when Lucas and Blanco decided to do “something together”. Both had a passion for drones and worked with these devices in what is still the most popular profession today: audiovisual production. “But they have many opportunities, so in 2019 we thought about which is the most interesting one.” Agricultural activities with drones were not even offered in Spain and they found their market niche, made possible by the State Agency for Aviation Safety: “It was obvious that once we knew how to combine free software tools and drones with different sensors, we could solve problems. And we were right, because in a year we have rendered the first services”.
FlyDronAir has five employees and offers work to a group of pilots who specialize in this field. “At the moment we cover two geographical areas: Galicia and the Valencian Community. We are structuring our specific training and in fact we are striving to standardize it in some way because this sector is going to explode at any moment”. Managing drones and extracting information from free software allows them to perform services such as remote pest detection, air treatments, and even planting. They work for between 15 and 20 clients, including farmers with medium and large scale expansions and administrations, to whom they provide services ranging from unit census to reforestation.
“For a farmer with more than 10 or 15 hectares, despite what he believes, it is impossible to have complete control over the state of the crop. We can analyze the water stress of a plant, identify pests, anticipate anomalies…”. Lucas cites the variety of crops they are currently working on: orange, lemon, persimmon, vineyards, grains, vegetables and golf courses, where their water spend control information “is a very profitable tool.” They can cover up to 900 hectares in three days, although Spanish legislation considers them “a treatment from the air, although we return to two meters above the ground”. They are confident of an imminent regulatory change that would allow for soil treatment, as is already the case in Latin America, where planes weighing up to 60kg can be flown and sprayed with crop protection.
“Currently, we can see which tree is starting a plague or which, for example, is lacking nitrogen. We prevent some customers from losing between 20% and 30% of a crop. In addition, we ration each treatment dose and can spray more or less water, foliar fertilizers, biostimulants, etc. on the same area. As if these benefits may seem small, these teams can work in the field just after it rains, while the usual machines cannot set foot on the ground until it dries. Reason enough to believe that the future of agriculture depends on drones. And this revolution has only just begun; FlyDronAir, together with the Polytechnic University of Valencia, is developing its own algorithm for even more precise detection. A virtual and instantaneous control of plants that increases yields and avoids wasting resources. Who should have told these two drone freaks less than 10 years ago.
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