Drones in Landscaping? (ft. Nicholas Hoxter)

Have you ever considered using drones for you business??

Well, if you have, you're gonna love this issue.?

Mike ( Michael Mayberry , Client Success Lead, Scythe Robotics ) and I have a podcast on YouTube called Beer Chai Future. We got Nicholas Hoxter , Branch Manager, LandCare LLC to join us for an episode. Believe me, the guy is a walking encyclopedia on drones!

Here’s how the conversation went in my own lightly edited words.?

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Q: So how'd you get into this Nick? ??

I bought my own drone because it was like, this is going to make my life my job easier. And I'm going to be able to do more, because?I'll have real time images or real time orthomosaics - you know, 3d models of my properties.

So then I could spend less time behind a wheel and you know, pop on a program, look at my images and measure certain enhancements or anything really because it’s so high definition. So that's ultimately how I got into it.

Q: This is still somewhat a new technology for the landscaping industry. Why should any landscape company look at this technology or invest in this technology? And are there companies that should not do it either at this point or at all? ??

Yeah, that's a really good question. And I thought a lot about that, and I honestly thought, "why wouldn't you?" I mean, this is not a $20,000 piece of equipment. This one right here is a little bit higher end, (900 bucks, call it). There's other ones that DJI makes that are very entry level.

When you start doing it outside of recreational use, you need to have a commercial license. It took me about three months to study. It's pretty involved, but so is getting your pesticide license. You know, I kind of looked at it as like, this is just another license to benefit the business. So I spent that time, got the license, got the drone, there's some different programs and whatnot that you can use on the back end, but the upfront costs are not crazy.?

The perspective that it can provide to you, your customers, and people just watching your business grow is super valuable. ?

Q: So what did you learn from that course apart from flying the plane?

I learned that I don't want to fly airplanes. At times, it gets pretty detailed - like the air. If you just Google an aeronautical map, those are pretty intense. There's so much information in one little area. You have to know all of that when you throw up one of these.?

Now, there's tools out there that you can use to avoid going through that trouble and you don't have to call the flight control every time you want to throw one of these up. It's basically a quick approval through the FAA. I have this app called Kitty Hawk. It allows me to do a quick submission to the FAA and within seconds I get a approval from the airport saying, you're good to fly in this area for this amount of time, at no more than this height above ground level. It's that simple.?

I've heard a lot on a couple of my posts on LinkedIn. I think someone commented they're like, this is really cool. Only if, if it wasn't so strict in the DC area. Yes, it is, for reasons. But it's not if you have your license, there's a more extended process to follow to get the approval. I found this drone blocks from the Capitol Building in DC. It took three months to get that approval, and a letter from the mayor and a letter from the owner. All that is possible. Don't look at the DC metropolitan area as just not being worth it. There's just certain processes that you need to follow.

Q: You said you use the drone to measure sites. Why do you prefer that over using measuring tools that use aerial imagery??

Yeah, awesome question. The DC area is growing like crazy. One day, here's just a field with trees and the next, they're all gone and half the building’s built. So there's been times when we run into a building that was just built that we need to do a takeoff on and provide a high quality bid.

You pop on Google or any sort of service and it's not there. So what are your options??Do you break out that old measuring wheel and get to work?

With the drone, you show up on site, drive over to your predetermined takeoff area, hit Play, and you can get right back in your car as long as you have sight of the drone at all times. The drone takes off by itself, starts taking all those images in the path that you determined on your computer in your office - and you're fiddling away with other stuff.

If it needs a recharge, it'll come right back to where it took off from. Swap out the battery, hit play again, and you're good.?We'll take that over the measuring wheel all day.

Q: Where’d you think drone tech is headed? What’s next?

This is still very, very new and I'll stick to it - you know, the sky's the limit. I grew up on a 400 acre farm on the Eastern Shore. Growing up on the farm, I've seen a lot of things start in agriculture and they seem to kind of work their way over into our industry, like, autonomous and the RTK. You know, they're putting RTK GPS on all tractors now.?

Spraying for insects and diseases is so pinpoint accurate now. We don't have to flood the whole field with chemicals. I think that's on its way over into our industry and drones help with that. You fly a drone and get a whole image of a field.

And using the multi spectral view on some drones, you can see these hotspot areas, and that data can transmit over to the tractor doing the spraying and it knows exactly where to spray.

Pretty awesome stuff.?

Now I'm watching it work its way into golf course and turf grass management. So I think it's only a matter of time before we're doing that similar stuff on customer sites with their turfgrass.?

If you want to think even further in the future, for tree care, we could be using drones to do hazard assessments and look for these insects and diseases that hit the top of the canopy first and make their way down. In the old days, you had to climb a tree to do a risk assessment. I don't think you'll have to do that much longer because of what drones can do.

I would much rather have one of my employees fly a drone up to take a look than strap on and climb up in there. We’ve worked with tree companies before and that's a huge liability. ??

Plus, the quality of image these drones can take is insane. Some of the cameras on these drones right now are super impressive. DJI has this drone with a ridiculously powerful camera (it’s like 700 megapixels).?

I saw a video of it where some guys are using these drones to inspect big power lines. And they take this image from like 75 feet away. Then on the computer, they zoom in, and they zoom in and they keep zooming in, and you're like, when is this going to stop!?

You can literally read the numbers on those glass insulators on the power level. That's insane!

In our world, inspecting trees, you'll be able to count the insects that are on the tree or something like that, and really be able to assess in a proper manner.

The applications are endless.

Fin.

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