The drones are designed by Precision AI to spot, identify, and kill the weeds without drenching the entire crop in chemicals.
For the past three years, Terry Aberhart has watched the spindly, fixed-wing drones zip across the big skies over his farm in Canada’s Saskatchewan province, testing a technology that could be the future of weeding.
Apart from the environmental toll, that conventional spray-it-all approach also results in colossal financial waste. Aberhart spent nearly C$1 million on herbicides in 2022 alone to protect the wheat, canola and pulses growing on a slice of prairie larger than Manhattan."Even if we could save 50% on average, it’s a huge saving,” he says.
Precision AI says its approach can reduce herbicide use by as much as 90% compared to traditional methods. The startup was one of a dozen winners of BloombergNEF’s 2023 Pioneers award, which aims to spotlight early-stage climate tech innovators with game-changing potential. "There are a lot of new developments and efforts towards using automated robotic solutions in agriculture,” says Manoj Karkee, a professor specializing in agricultural engineering at Washington State University."We’re closer than ever to starting utilizing these technologies.”
For now, Precision AI’s drone is operated with supervision from a human pilot. But McCann says his company is poised to introduce a fully autonomous spraying drone that can take off, fly and land by itself - as long as regulators grant permission.
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