Though organic™ farmers sell bucolic imagery of hoeing by hand and sunsets over fields of corn, it is just marketing to the gullible. All farmers who make more than enough money to pay their real estate taxes(1) are high-tech gurus. They use real-time data on the health of their land and their crops, they want to use just enough product to get the most food with the least environmental strain.

It's a long way from the $3 billion environmental imagery of farmers with leaky backpacks drenching plants in science and cackling like Scrooge McDuck on a pile of coins about it.

American farming is so advanced that if the world adopted our science, farmland equivalent to the entire country of India could revert to nature with no change in food. American farming has become so successful that 16,000,000 acres have gone out of use. And that is without the "factory farming" environmentalists campaign against really existing.

That gets left out of activist campaigns against farmers. They blame agriculture for everything from global warming to homeopathic levels of PFAS in drinking water, while ignoring that farmers are penalized most if there is less science. Their margins are thin and each year they risk their most valuable asset - land - just to be vilified by urban environmentalists who have never helped anyone eat. 


Photo by Ubaldo Torres, Texas A&M University.

Farming, like Formula 1 racing, embraces advanced technology long before it can be affordable for everyone else. So they are first to embrace drone technology that optimizes nozzle type and application volume. Same food, less environmental strain, less cost. That's a big win for everyone.

Recent experiments used drones provided by USDA at two College Station, Texas (go Aggies!) sites. They wanted to test air induction, drift guard, and extended range nozzles, flat fan varieties, against a legacy four-nozzle backpack sprayer and two low-volume single-nozzle drones. The experiment was on turf, not food, but the finding that they can be effective in extremely targeted environments mean they will definitely optimize food production.

NOTE:

(1) American food is grown by 2,200,000 family farms and just 2% of the population. It is not a joke that I wrote half of them make only enough to pay their taxes. You wouldn't work if the tax rate was 100% but most of them do, and nearly all have someone working outside the farm on top of it. If factory farming existed outside marketing campaigns by white people in cities, it would be even less strain on the environment.