Farm Bureau Wants Tweaks to Drone Rules

Agriculture should be one of the largest industries to benefit from the new drone rules issued by the FAA earlier this week.  The American Farm Bureau said it will continue working with the FAA to tweak certain restrictions in the rules.

The Farm Bureau suggested several changes to FFA rules, including not requiring drones be operated in the user’s line of sight or not operated directly over people, but those suggestions were not adopted.  A challenge facing many farmers, especially those with large operations, the fields are not necessarily contiguous.

The group’s Director of Congressional Relations, R.J. Karney, gave the FAA credit for building in flexibility by allowing waivers to those restrictions.  He said he hopes this will help build a case for more fine-tuning of the rules to help the technology take off for farmers and ranchers. Agriculture could make up almost 80% of expected commercial drone use. Drones could map terrain or monitor fields for pest and disease pressure, just to name a few of the expected uses.

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