By Manny Piñol
La Trinidad, Benguet – Five thousand hectares of vegetable farms in Buguias town and other selected towns of Benguet Province will serve as the pilot area of the newest farming technology that the Department of Agriculture is adopting – Aerial Spraying using remote-controlled Drones.
I made this announcement on Friday following the successful test of Drone Spraying in the vegetable farms in La Trinidad witnessed by Benguet Governor Cresencio Pacalso, representatives from the Japanese Embassy and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and hundreds of curious vegetable farmers of the province.
The test, conducted by DMM Corporation of Japan, was earlier scheduled to be conducted in the potato fields of Buguias but the venue was changed because of my tight schedule where I had to be present in five events in one day in Baguio City.
It took the drone just a few minutes to cover a patch of vegetables and according to the data provided by the Japanese service provider company, it will only take 10 minutes to cover one hectare.
The drone could be used to spray foliar fertilizer and other biological pest control solutions and is expected to bring down farm operations costs and increase productivity.
Under the agreement which will be formalized next week, the Department of Agriculture (DA) will support the spraying in the first 5,000-hectare pilot area by providing funds to cover for the cost of P1,500 per hectare of drone spraying.
The drones will be operated by the Japanese company, DMM Corporation, which will serve as a service provider.
Officially, it will be the provincial government of Benguet which will engage DMM Corporation in the pilot spraying with the DA providing funds to the provincial government from its High Value Crops budget.
While the use of drones in agriculture is not a new technology, this will be the first time that the DA will be utilizing drones in farm operations.
The DA is already using drones for aerial surveys and geotagging operations, especially for farm to market roads.
The use of drones is ideal for the farms in the Cordillera Region because most of these are carved out of the mountainsides and the task of going up and down to spray patches of vegetables is a very costly operation for farmers.
With the remote controlled drones, farmers also will no longer have direct contact with the biological or chemical mists emitted by handheld sprayers.
After the Benguet Pilot Areas, the DA will introduce the use of drones in other areas of the country where farmers are willing to adopt modern farming technology.
(Photos of the drone tests by Herman Danis of DA-CAR RAFID.)
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