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High Yields
Illustration by Chris Philpot
Hobbyist drones might make headlines with their crashes on the White House lawn, but the market for unmanned vehicles is rapidly expanding beyond the niche: Over the next decade, according to industry trade group forecasts, commercial drones will create more than 100,000 jobs and $82 billion worth of value.
Amazon famously entered the space in 2013, announcing plans to use drones for its 30-minute delivery service, but there’s plenty of startup activity, too. Hawk Aerial, launched last year by CEO Kevin Gould (MBA 1985), offers machines equipped for everything from inspecting bridges to tracking energy usage. But the biggest vertical of all—one expected to account for 80 percent of the commercial market—is in agriculture.
Using a Hawk Aerial drone and some high-tech spectral analysis, farmers can detect problems in their fields related to water, fertilizer, or disease before they could spot them with their naked eye. “We call this precision farming,” says Gould. “The operator can see a problem and nip it in the bud, rather than wait until the end of the year and say, ‘I wonder why that section didn’t produce much?’ ”
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