Students test drones to pollinate date trees

In this week’s Home Grown we look at a new partnership between the University of Arizona and the local date industry. Students are testing drones to pollinate date trees.

Tom Fitschen, Farm Manager at Bard Date Company explains how why they are testing this on dates out of all crops. “Date production is a particularly labor intensive crop to grow. We will touch a tree with labor probably 12 times over the course of the season,” Fitschen said.

Right now, the date industry uses sidewalk leaf blowers to pollinate the trees. Date harvesting starts in August. Students from the Univeristy of Arizona started four years ago testing the idea of drone pollination using a nylon stocking. They hung the stocking under the drone and the rotors kicked up the pollen in the stocking and pollinated the date trees.

After seeing success with this, a team of eight engineering students made this their senior project.

“What they were trying to do is build a mechanism a little fancier than a nylon stocking, which they did with a 3D printer that would dispense pollen at the command of a control system, so it goes from one tree and dispenses the pollen and then onto the next tree so it’s a savings of pollen and of labor,” Executive Director of the Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture, Paul Brierley said.

This year, three teams are creating a commercialized prototype and there is also a business group of students working to see how they can market this product and eventually get a patent on it.

“What we have seen so far is very promising,” Fitschen said. “Last year, we were at a different ranch and you could see a night and day difference in what was pollinated and what wasn’t…just taking it to the next step as far as covering the acres we need to cover and do it in a timely fashion, those are the things I think we hope to improve this next go around,” he added.