Tell Congress to support autonomous electric crop dusters in the next Farm Bill!

Unmanned autonomous electric crop dusters are taking off across Latin America, reducing carbon emissions substantially while enabling more precise and limited application of dangerous pesticides.

“Replacing a traditional spray plane with the Pelican Spray is equivalent to removing 100 internal combustion engine cars from the road in terms of carbon emissions,”

— CEO Michael Norcia of startup Pyka, to Bloomberg

For example, Brazil’s vast agricultural sector is quickly becoming an emerging leader in the farm-drone field, with new models allowed to operate by default and an order for 20 cutting-edge Pelican electric crop dusters (which run on hot-swappable battery packs for rapid recharging!) recently placed by a Brazilian buyer.

The benefits extend beyond energy efficiency. Traditional crop dusters deliver about 91% of the chemicals they spray to the crops, with the rest evaporating or blowing away, but Pelican drones deliver closer to 96%, reducing both waste and potential damage to nearby ecosystems. This is an incremental improvement, but the agricultural sector is huge, so it could deliver very substantial benefits. Plus, unlike human pilots, autonomous electric crop dusters can also fly at night, giving them an advantage in fighting nocturnal crop pest species.

As this is a brand-new technology, now is the ideal moment for proactive citizens to get a “foot in the door” and help ensure future support for electric drone crop dusters from the U.S. government. You’ve probably heard already that Congress is still discussing the upcoming Farm Bill, a huge investment in American agriculture (the U.S. spends an average of $648 billion per year on Farm Bill programs) that’s up for renewal for the first time since 2018. As with our previous Farm Bill-related policy actions on climate-resilient crops, methane-reducing vaccines for cattle, methane-eating microbes, phytomining, electro-agriculture, decentralized clean ammonia production, steam seed treatment, AI-accelerated crop breeding, and low-methane rice, autonomous electric crop dusters are a brand-new invention and not really on the political radar screen yet. That means there’s a really great opportunity here to tell Congress to use the Farm Bill to help promote its deployment!

Tell Congress to support autonomous electric crop dusters in the next Farm Bill!