New company formed for agricultural use of unmanned vehicles

The three Idaho companies that received federal approval to fly drones commercially for agricultural purposes have formed a new company, Empire Unmanned.

Empire Unmanned is led by Brad Ward, who is also a vice president with Advanced Aviation Solutions. Along with Adavso, which is based in Star, Empire Airlines in Hayden and Blair Farms in Kendrick received Federal Aviation Administration approval in January to fly unmanned aircraft systems for commercial purposes.

Ward said the new company has six employees and is clearing its final hurdles before serving customers in March. He said the company’s goal is to have 100 farms as customers this year and have its unmanned aircraft work on 100,000 acres of farm land.

The unmanned aircraft have cameras and other sensors that can find stressed areas in farms, due to water, pest or other issues. They can also track seeding rates as well as fertilizer and chemical application. The aircraft can gather data faster than someone can walk across a field, and Ward said their sensors, which include infrared and near-infrared sensors, can get more information than the human eye.

“There’s a lot of information that’s invisible to us, just outside the visible spectrum,” Ward said. “Crop stress will show up where you otherwise can’t see it.” He also said farms that now use satellite imaging get more detailed and customized results through using Empire Unmanned’s vehicles.

In addition to having staff that can fly the flying vehicles, Empire Unmanned also has a geographic information systems team that is working on software to analyze the information the vehicles collect. Ward said the company’s business model calls for charging farms a fee for each visit to a farm, paying based on the acreage that is analyzed by the UAS.