Why the U.S.’ blanket ban on drones is bad for farmers

from smartplanet.com

State officials and progressive farmers advocate the use of drone technology for monitoring fields but FAA regulations are keeping them on the ground.

Robert Blair owns a farm in Kendrick, Idaho, that has been in his family more than a century. Since 2006, he has also owned an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone.

That’s no coincidence: Blair would like to fly his camera-equipped craft over his fields. A 2013 study by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International predicted that 90 percent of drone use will center on agricultural purposes. “Farmers have to go out and scout their crops every couple of weeks,” he explains. A drone crisscrossing the air could perform that work much more effectively. Aerial surveillance could create “precision agriculture” applications that, in the grand scheme, could improve food safety, increase food supply and decrease pesticide use — all of which would be good economically for farmers and environmentally for all of us. But the U.S. government won’t let Blair use his drone to improve his crops.

That’s because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) bans any use of drones for commercial purposes, allowing only “hobbyists” to fly them for fun. That prohibition stems from a 1981 advisory titled “Model Aircraft Operating Standards.” It’s not a law, per se, but guidance for hobbyists to keep drones away from sensitive areas and to fly them under 400 feet to avoid other aircraft. While Blair — who writes a blog called The Unmanned Farmer — admits to using his drone in limited ways on his farm, “flying under hobby rules in that gray area, doing scouting,” as he puts it, even that act would probably earn him one of the cease-and-desist letters the FAA sends out when it learns of anyone flying a drone for commercial purposes without a special permit, usually granted to universities and law enforcement agencies.

The good news is that the FAA is developing drone-use rules, which should be finalized in late 2015. But there’s impatience with the time frame, and in February, state agriculture officials unanimously called for continued development of drone technology for farming use.

The main concerns about UAVs center on airspace safety and privacy issues. When Amazon announced its intention to eventually deliver packages by drones, the huge buzz was accompanied by many eyebrow-raising questions: what about potential aerial collisions or malfunctioning crafts dropping out of the sky or drones capturing images of people and their residences?

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