Milling & Baking News - January 3, 2017 - 27

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use more sophisticated hardware
sometimes could mean traveling to
another continent, Europe, to learn
specific drone systems. Through
trial-and-error, he decided on a business plan to amass a fleet of about 14
drones to offer to agricultural customers, who would own the data collected and be able to access it anytime
via a proprietary portal offered by
business partners.
Green Aero Tech has six offices
across Southern Canada from Vancouver, B.C., to Ottawa, and there are
now plans to expand into the northern United States.
"We incorporated as a U.S. company about five or six months ago," Mr.
Hiebert said. "We're going to be acquiring and/or merging with a couple of key players in the U.S. That's
what I will be working on for the next
few months."
In the meantime, Green Aero Tech

'It's not about
a new fad; it's
about finding
real problems
and solving
them.'
- Scott Hiebert, Green Aero Tech

was developed following a capital investment of at least $300,000 in equipment alone, with additional money
spent on testing drone systems.
"We started in hardware," he
said. "That was two to three years
ago. We couldn't get a distribution
agreement on some of the systems
we really liked to use. We ended
up running into problems: People
didn't want to spend money on
something they weren't sure how
they could use.
"Some farmers didn't have enough
time; some farmers didn't have
enough capital. We probably spent
another $200,000 on UAVs that didn't
work. Some of them we returned;
some of them we still have."
He said one system he considered
investing in cost nearly $100,000 and
required traveling to Europe to get
training on it.
"It didn't work well," he noted.
Another system manufactured in the
United States also didn't work as advertised.
"Some of them didn't work well at
all," he said. "Some of them crashed. We
spent a lot of money trying these things."
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Mr. Hiebert came to the conclusion
that selling UAV hardware to farmers
might not be the way to go.
"We thought maybe this market
isn't ready for everyone to own their
own drones," he said.
His typical customer is a farmer
in his 50s, because younger ones often try to work with
drones on their own.
"They think they
have a little bit more
time, but then they
find out they don't
have the time," he
said.
Contracting challenges
But contracting out drones meant
Green Aero Tech would have to offer
a way to process the data - and that
offered additional challenges.
"We spent all this money on equipment, and then we ran into a problem with processing," he said. "So
we found a company that had solved
that problem. They had a data center
and they needed to grow on the service side. A brilliant guy ran the data
center and had the software - that
cost a lot of money, too."
Green Aero Tech merged with the
data processing company, AgSky, in
2015.
"They had the back-end data center, and we had the drones," he said.
The company's services are offered
in strategic partnerships with other
agricultural businesses.
"Quite a few John Deere dealerships are offering our services in
Canada," he said. "We are utilizing
their sales network, and everybody
wins because now a farmer doesn't
have to go to 18 different places
to get his data. We've developed a
portal so that farmers can have direct access to their data through our
web site."
That data always is owned by the
producer.
"We're not a data company; we're
an information company," he said.
"We'll store it, but in the end it's
theirs. We keep backups for them for
our records and for safe-keeping."
He emphasized that, in most cases,
Green Aero Tech doesn't analyze the
data that is collected but leaves that
to experts such as agronomists. He
said customers "order the data and
it gets input into their farm management software and then their agronomists or drainage manager can view
that and make recommendations, and
it will automatically import to their

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monitors. That's where the value is."
No internet needed
Mr. Hiebert added that land remote
from cell-phone coverage is not a
problem.
"We don't require the internet," he
said. "We've worked in areas where
(we) would be off-line
for a couple of days."
In these early years
of Green Aero Tech's
operation, most of its
drone-powered data
gathering has been
focused on drainage issues.
"We can show the natural flow of
water," he explained. "We can show
hills, we can show depressions, show
the waterways and how many acres
are draining across the land. Where
we stop is giving recommendations.
"We would create a map for a
farmer's field that would give elevations that were accurate to within two
inches, and that's a lot when you are
covering literally every single inch
and you are getting just over an inch
in ground resolution. If you are getting a survey that is accurate to what
is just under an inch, you'd have to
walk every inch of your land.
"What was great about that compared with driving those fields is you're
getting everything, you're not missing
ditches, you're not bringing foreign
materials onto the soil. We have a big
problem in Canada with biosecurity.
So we're not dragging equipment from
one province to another. If it works in
Canada, it will work in the States."
He added that drainage is a big issue both in Canada and the Northern
Midwest mostly because of the climate. But there are other capabilities
as well, in addition to helping farmers deal with drainage issues.
"We're creating a map that shows
certain types of crop stress," Mr.
Hiebert said. "It's very good at showing the moisture content of the soil
and seeing where it's stressed. This is
important, for instance, when crops
are flowering. An infrared can be
very uniform over a crop."
He believes producers will balk
if drone companies try to tell them
what their agricultural problems are,
rather than just offering top-quality
data for others to interpret.
"You aren't going to tell a guy who
has farmed for 40 years everything
that is wrong with his land," he said.
"He knows his land really well. That
said, there are guys who try to drain
their water uphill." MBN
Milling & Baking News XJanuary 3, 2017 / 27

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Milling & Baking News - January 3, 2017

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