Drone Nerds to Carry DJI Agras T40 Agricultural Spraying Drone for North America

Nov 30, 2022

Drone Nerds, a commercial drone solutions provider and DJI Enterprise Platinum Partner, is set to launch the DJI Agras T40 drone as it debuts in North America on Oct 12, 2022. The DJI Agras T40 launched in China in late 2021, making it a larger capacity alternative to its predecessor, the DJI T30, and becoming DJI’s new flagship agricultural spraying drone.

The DJI T40 is designed to help cultivators quickly and easily spray orchards, crop fields, and fruit trees. It has a coaxial rotor system that allows the drone to hover and maintain a more stable flight pattern as it sprays. The T40 has a 40-liter tank that has a spreading capacity of up to 50 kg (70 l) and a spray capacity of up to 40 kg of water or other liquid chemicals.

With an ultra-high-definition 12 MP camera on an adjustable gimbal, the DJI T40 can collect clear images of agricultural fields, farmland, and orchards in real-time. Its intelligent spacial recognition system allows the T40 to identify plot boundaries and obstacles automatically for intelligent route planning and efficient spraying and spreading. It features an omnidirectional radar and binocular vision to detect obstacles at a distance of up to 50 meters. Its advanced spatial recognition system makes the DJI T40 capable of flying through orchards and dense fruit tree plantations with minimal crash risk. Through the DJI Smart Agriculture cloud platform, users can easily automate field inspections, crop growth analysis, and disease monitoring.

To support full-day operations, the DJI T40 has a 30,000 mAh intelligent flight battery for an ultra-long service life of up to 1,500 charges—the smart charging hub can power a battery fully in 9 minutes.

“The DJI Agras T40 is a complete solution for the agriculture industry—this solution is going to help farmers and agriculturists tap into the future of digital and precision farming by automating tedious manual processes,” states Jeremy Schneiderman, Drone Nerds’ CEO.

Those who would like more information on the DJI Agras T40 can connect with a Drone Nerds’ solution expert by visiting their website at enterprise.dronenerds.com or emailing experts@dronenerds.com.

About Drone Nerds: Established in 2014, Drone Nerds focuses on ensuring that its customers have the right UAV solution for their unique operational needs. With its proprietary Always Flying™ program, Drone Nerds provides reliability and assurance for enterprise implementations across industry verticals, including public safety, government, agriculture, construction, energy, inspection, and more. For more information, visit enterprise.dronenerds.com.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”