What Are ADI’s Core Goals?
The core objective of the Agricultural Drone Initiative is to advocate for American agricultural drone manufacturers, owners, and operators on Capitol Hill
ADI pursues this by focusing on three interrelated policy objectives to drive the agricultural drone industry forward and help America outcompete China in this critical sector.
1 - Protect American Farmers As Congress Acts Against Legitimate National Security Threats
Congress must ensure that the American farmer, drone operator, and buisinessmen are not disproportionally harmed by the valid and critical goal of getting Chinese-controlled drones out of American airspace and off of American farms. ADI seeks to aid in this effort by championing the creation of a viable and robust market of truly American agricultural drones, which must exist for us to meaningfully compete with Chinese counterparts.
2 - Secure Federal Research Grants for Fundamental Heavy Lift Drone Research
Currently American agricultural drone investment is caught In a localized minimum in which startups run out of money as they attempt to solve the basic engineering problems associated with ag-drones. By allowing American research universities to solve the fundamental engineering challenges, private dollars can focus on the optimization and innovation of the platforms, which America does so well.
The question is often raised, how broad a constituency might benefit from these federal dollars? By our estimates, nearly 100% of the hardware and 85% of the software needed is shared between this scale of agricultural and military drone - the shared objective being a highly ruggedized drone, able to rapidly and reliably deploy up to 100 pounds of agricultural, logistical, or kinetic payloads, time after time after time. The state whose universities lead in heavy lift ag-drone research will organically develop a robust collection of emergent startups, and ancillary companies peripheral to the universities’ work - making it a compelling opportunity for a state to take the lead on.
3 - Streamline Agricultural Drone Licensing and Registration Process and Compliance
The FAA must improve the licensing and registration process to improve compliance. Currently, heavy lift drone operators face a nine to 12 month processing window for their waivers, which are only good for 24 months. An additionally long registration time is also required for each drone, with even minor errors in paperwork sending applicants to the back of the line.
Further compounding the waste, the current process is for each applicant to submit approximately 15 pages of boiler-plate, which are all drafted identically save for the names of the applicant, which creates a kabuki theatre of ‘unique’ exemption applications which the FAA has to engage with, when the same obligations could be created by instantiating the necessary terms in regulations.
Because ag-drones are operated on isolated farms, about 80% of heavy-drone operators simply do not register which harms the industry by forcing people to be generally non-compliant and therefore unaware of the most critical compliance rules - further, the significant underreporting severely impairs the ability of lawmakers and policy makers to understand how large this industry is, and, in turn, deprives us from getting the critical support we need to advance ag-drone technology into the future.
ADI recommends transitioning heavy-lift ag drone licensing and registration to a presumptive authorization model in which the waiver process is transitioned into an appended version of the Part 107 test, focusing on aviation application of agricultural inputs, and then registrations are executed on the FAA’s DroneZone with increased data requirements. Both processes would grant the right to operate the drones, but then the FAA could review licenses and registrations and flag anyone they do not feel can properly operate. While the presumptive response would be that that is too permissive, the current system, in which compliance is effectively punished because so many non-compliance people face no consequences, ADI advocates for a more pragmatic solution that at least informs FAA of everyone in American airspace.