Rural
4 November, 2026
Drones ag footprint still developing
The idea of using small unmanned aircraft to assist with agricultural work is actually about 40 years old, when in the 1980s Yamaha was commissioned by the Japanese government to find ways of applying crop chemicals to small rice paddies in difficult terrain to offset the problem of an ageing workforce.
Those first machines weren’t the delicate drones we know today.
They looked more like miniature helicopters, ran petrol motors and cost well over $US 100,000 each – and there were extensive training and support costs as well.
But the emergence of companies like DJI into the aerial camera market in the 2010s with their ready-to-fly Phantom drones helped the price points drop sharply, and since then the possibilities of what the tech could be employed to do have exploded significantly, driven in no small part by the continual overall improvement of battery life.
Fast forward to today, and the employment of drones as a genuine option in a farmer’s toolkit for targeted spraying and much more is increasing, but Horsham’s CropOpti owner Trav Hair knows it’s still going to take a little more time for the tech to get common industry acceptance.
He’s hoping the local cropping farmers will look more closely at what benefits can be offered by drones, with spraying effectiveness improved, costs being significantly reduced, and where challenges such as wet ground become almost inconsequential.
“We've sort of been in the drone space for probably the last three or four years in doing what we do,” Trav said.
“We do a lot of weed mapping nowadays, where we're flying drones with different cameras and finding different weeds in the paddock, and then creating maps to actually put in the boom sprays to go and spot spray those weeds.
“It's all really new technology.”
But with several clients having already employed the services he’s offering, and a new dedicated drone pilot position created earlier this year at CropOpti, the experience from the venture has been building with his acquiring of a high-resolution camera to work alongside three DJI Agras T100 sprayers.
“We've got a Sentera 65 megapixel camera that we put onto a DJI Matrice 350 drone,” Trav said.
“We send that out (and) fly it at around about 60 metres in height, and it'll give us imagery of any sort of weed about as big as your thumbnail, like green weed on the ground.
“Then we run it through a programm (which) then identifies those weeds, and their location as well, and then through that we can create a map to put into a boom spray, and then the boom spray goes along and spot sprays those weeds out as they're going over the paddock.”
But using drones can also be an option – with a spray footprint as small as about 25 by 25 centimetres, and this year having included some periods of heavy rain, Trav said the ability to use a minimal amount of chemicals without having to worry about battling soft ground had an appeal he didn’t have to work too hard to sell.
“Definitely this season's been one of those where we've had significant rainfall all year,” he said.
“This year where we've been out doing drone spraying with the T100s, whether that be fungicide, herbicide, or even bug spray.”
He said the conditions have helped some producers move on from just seeing it as “a bit of a fad thing”.
“A lot of guys sort of always said, ‘nah, they’re just a waste of time’,” Trav said.
“Now all of a sudden, when their paddocks are wet, and they can't get on, and they need to get – especially fungicides – on, the drones have played a really big part in that.”
Trav said although his list of clients was still relatively small, it was clearly increasing given the equipment he had to buy to support the operation.
“We've advanced ours from one drone, to two drones to three drones,” he said.
“I didn't think it'd probably get to the point where it has this year, but I think the more we actually do it now, the more we learn – and guys are starting to understand that the drone can be useful for different reasons.
“Even coming into this time of the year where guys with canola crops want to go and desiccate their crops with Roundup or something like that. The canola crops this year are so tall that driving any boom spray in there is actually going to knock a significant amount of crop down.
“So it's actually better value for them to fly a drone over it.”
Trav said the mapping proves its worth too.
“That's where we're seeing some really good return on investment from growers, where we're able to actually identify the weeds in the paddock that we want to spray,” he said.
“What we're generally finding is when we go out and do a weed map in a paddock, rather than having to spray 100 per cent of the paddock, we might only have to spray about 10 per cent.
“So getting a 90 per cent reduction in chemicals – agronomically for us in what we do – that reduction in use allows us to use better chemistry in that paddock to do a better job.
“Because we're not using so much of it – the more expensive chemicals generally come into play.”
The growing scope of agricultural drone technology isn't restricted to cropping paddocks – recently Agriculture Victoria commissioned company Drone-Hand to trial AI-powered systems aimed at tackling livestock predation under the Dingo Drone Pilot Project.
The $15 million trial will run in the north-east and north-west of the state, tying directly into regional protection measures like the Yanac Dingo Exclusion Fence Program.
In the north-west, autonomous drones will be tested to survey extensive fence lines for digging, damage, and breaches, while north-east operations will focus on training computer vision models to detect and identify dingo movements onto private farmland.
Agriculture Victoria program manager Stephen Baud said the proof-of-concept project aimed to deliver timely, actionable data to help producers safeguard their properties.
“We recognise the challenges facing Victorian livestock producers and want to test this technology to see if drones can complement and strengthen existing livestock protection measures," he said.
If successful, the next phase will focus on testing and refining the technology to support future deployment on farms.
In the meantime, the sector is also creating new employment opportunities.
Thrilled to get out of nursing and turning recreational drone flying into a career change is CropOpti drone pilot Amanda Brownsea, with her own learning curve after six or seven months now settling down to running a full obstacle identification, mapping and spraying operation with confidence.
She said while the map data interfacing with different machinery has worked better with some brands than others – and these challenges were being ironed out - she’s enjoying the overall work.
“Once you do it a few times, you’ve sort of got your own rhythm,” Amanda said.
“I'll pre-map the paddock first and then set the boundaries, find the obstacles.
“Then it's on autopilot, and I'm just maintaining it. We're refilling it and doing battery swaps every three and a half minutes.
“They weigh about 15 kilos – I don't have to do bicep work at the gym, I can tell you that.
“So when that's happening though, that's pretty full on. You're watching the drone, and I might be running two - one's coming in, one's still out. So your eyes are on the controllers, and refilling and switching the batteries. So that's pretty go, go, go.”
Trav said the operation also had to consider being away from any mains power.
“We've got a 65 kVA generator, so we're charging three batteries at a time when we're running two drones,” he said.
But there was still more refinement of the entire workflow to achieve, which he estimated he’s on track to get to in about 12 months.
“The map's one thing, but then actually getting your machine to understand how to read the map, and then for your poppets and all your nozzles to come on at exactly the right time over these weeds… it's not just a silver bullet (or) quick fix.
“We're working at the moment with different people, different professionals within the industry on that machine tech side of things to actually help make that work as well.
“The technology's there with the drones and everything like that, but then the machine and the operational side of it, through the boom sprays and that kind of thing, is probably just a little bit behind at the moment.”
But he was confident the kinks could be ironed out.
“To the point that we're at today, I can understand why a lot of people haven't got involved in it,” Trav said.
“There's some real tear-your-hair-out moments of ‘why won't this work?’ but ... moving into the next few years, it's going to be a massive piece of what's going to happen in ag, and probably bigger than what I originally thought.”