Last week at the UKAB Large Farm Management (LFM) conference, the co-founder of DroneUA, together with other representatives of large agribusiness, the state and technology companies, announced the two most innovative areas in which Ukrainian agriculture will continue to actively invest over the next 5 years.
The first direction — spraying drones, which in 5 years have already formed a completely new market. In the forecast for the next period of similar duration, UAVs and robotics will become even more in demand not only in Ukraine, but also in the world, at the same time, among agricultural producers there will be a global transition to the service model.
Today, Ukraine is already the leader in Europe in the number of agricultural drones — more than 1.5 thousand units, with which more than 100 service teams already work. Agrodrones due to their resource saving — it is an alternative solution for processing crops. Even despite the difficult conditions, the demand for services continues to grow, especially during the desiccation season. This year, by the end of the season, a result of 2 million hectares processed by agricultural drones is expected, and this — twice as much as last year.
«A new market has already been created in Ukraine, which, based on the calculation of one application by drones on an area of 20 million hectares, will produce an additional $1.3 billion. For the minimum implementation of this effect, 2.5 thousand drone brigades consisting of 5,000 specialists. As a result of working with high-tech technologies, collecting additional crops and saving costs, 1 employee creates $ 200 thousand of additional economic effect!», — Valery Yakovenko notes.
The Ukrainian agricultural market is already switching to innovative programs that will be able to optimize the process of agricultural production and abandon "manual management" and, as a result, provide automated support for all operational processes and customer support. In the perspective of the next few years, agricultural producers will refuse to keep huge fleets of equipment on their balance sheet, spend money on their maintenance and depreciation.
One of such solutions is the Ag-startup, the FarmFleet platform — an effective tool for establishing communication between service teams and agricultural producers. The platform creates opportunities for timely planning of the season and reservation of resources for processing crops with spraying drones, without additional time costs of signing documents — the entire document flow can be conducted immediately in the system. Thanks to FarmFleet, agricultural producers will be able to free up their time for more strategic tasks.
The second direction — energy independence technologies. In the conditions of rising prices and shortage of energy resources, the demand for non-energy resources among the players of the agricultural market has increased. In the near future, agribusinesses will look for solutions that will help them achieve full energy autonomy, and every average citizen will seek to get rid of dependence on the monopoly supply of electricity by the state.
Energy independence technologies and agribusiness are only at first glance, incompatible things. But if you look at the question of the approach to grain drying – the connection between energy-efficient technologies and agriculture becomes obvious. Valery Yakovenko notes that the increase in the cost of energy carriers and monopoly dependence on the centralized supply of electricity by the state is already beginning to set the framework for agribusiness. As a result, agricultural producers do not have their own “vote” on the pricing of energy resources, due to which their costs in the cost of production will constantly increase. In addition, today in Ukraine electricity consumption is 7 years cheaper than in Europe. Taking this into account, it can be concluded that the cost per resource will only increase, accordingly, the price tag for grain drying may "drive" farmers in the minus.
Installation of autonomous local, even personal systems of energy independence — effective solution for this issue. Alternative energy sources and powerful storage are already being integrated into businesses. At the end of 2021, DroneUA started working with energy independence technologies and has already ensured the presence of EcoFlow portable charging stations with a total capacity of more than 4 MW/h. Already by the end of this year, this indicator will increase to 7 MW/h of total storage capacity.
