“For a while, it was hard to actually get out of the office because we were processing so many orders,” Ryan Seger says. “But now, with the slowdown, we’re going to have to be more proactive with customers and working with them directly at their farms. We’ll be on the road a lot more.”

The system is designed to help farmers control water movement into, out of and within fields, promising impressive efficiency and crop yield benefits.

“Hylio and MSU share common goals in advancing drone technology for agricultural applications,” Arthur Erickson said. “With our products and MSU’s programs, we can work together to pioneer best practices and teaching methods that will one day hopefully put this technology in the hands of a lot of American farmers.”

Labor — or more often a lack of it — is still the number one factor driving farmers’ adoption of automation and robotics solutions, according to panelists, demonstrators and casual attendees at last week’s FIRA USA show in California.

Mississippi State is partnering with John Deere through a master research agreement, establishing a framework for the university’s Agricultural Autonomy Institute to help develop technology to automate critical steps in the production of cotton and other crops.

Ecorobotix’s ARA ultra-high precision sprayer addresses this problem head-on, reducing drift by up to 95%, as shown in recent studies in Germany and the Netherlands.

For the 2024 growing season there were 50 robots in commercial use on farms in Indiana and Illinois monitoring more than 65 million plants.