(WGHP) — The back-and-forth over tariffs between the US and China is creating tension for a variety of businesses.
It’s also impacting a key and growing technology that helps to put food on your table. That technology is a roughly 50-pound agricultural drone.
“Farmers are amazingly efficient. They’re trying to figure out, ‘How can I be more productive. How can I create more product to sell?'” NC Cooperative Extension Director for Caldwell County Seth Nagy said.
Nagy teaches and helps other farmers use agricultural drones for everything from seeding to spraying herbicides and pesticides to getting a birds-eye view of every corner of a field, sometimes hundreds of acres wide.
“A lot of farmers have problems getting into fields when it’s wet, and a lot of our chemicals on the crops, especially fungicide on beans and corn. It’s time sensitive, so they need to do it when the time is right,” owner and CEO of Ag Drone Works Jim Adams said.
Those drones are also agile, getting into steep pastures and hard-to-reach places and navigating tight corners with telephone lines and cell towers.
But there’s a problem.
“What really disturbs me more than anything else is the fact that we’re not self-sufficient,” Adams said.
The drones themselves and their parts are made almost entirely in China. Adams’ company sells and helps farmers use the drones that he procures from Chinese companies. Tariff uncertainty makes his job harder.
“The price basically has doubled in the last 90 days. The lead time … doubled, too. More than doubled,” Adams said.
Now, it takes two months to get a drone in. The supply chain at popular companies like DJI seems to Adams like they’ve come to a screeching halt.
“We’re just not able to get product to furnish the farmers in what they need,” Adams said.
Experts say that in the US, we have the knowledge to build them, but we need the capital investment. With almost 50 registered spray drones in North Carolina and growing, the tech is attracting a new generation of those innovative farmers that Nagy said are essential.
“I think we’re able to bring some younger kids inm and I think some really neat value-added stuff,” Nagy said.
And Adams says we need to figure things out fast.
“The general public needs to be aware that if we can use this technology effectively and efficiently, it will really help in curbing food prices,” Adams said. “If not, we’re going to continue to see a spiral upward.”
Source: Fox 8 News Channel
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