Wellington resident starts drone agricultural business

WELLINGTON — From a film class at Wellington High School to purchasing a drone worth two Toyota Corollas, Ethan Moore is turning a hobby into a budding industry in Lorain County. Moore, an ICU nurse at Mercy Health - Lorain, is the owner and operator of Lake Erie Drone LLC, the first registered agricultural drone service provider in the county. "It's only until just this Monday (June 26) that we were able to get all of our documentation for all of our operating certificates," he said. It was the last piece of the puzzle for his new business to officially open. Moore's interest in drones started as a student in Dave Conklin's film studies class at Wellington High School, he said. In 2016, there was a large online community of drone builders — people purchasing parts online and piecemealing everything together. Moore went to his film teacher and pitched the idea to build a drone with a camera on it for the class to use to film with, and after Conklin agreed, Moore and another classmate researched everything and ordered parts before soldering it all together. They had to learn radio communications and telemetry, he said, but soon after the class ended, life got in the way of Moore's new hobby. Moore earned his associate of science degree while still in high school through the college credit plus program, and was the youngest to enroll in Lorain County Community College's nursing program. He graduated that program in 2021, and started work at Mercy Health - Lorain's emergency room. As he got settled into his career, and began working on his bachelor's degree online, he looked to get back into his old hobby that started at Wellington High, he said. "I still had that little drone thought in the back of my head," he said. "So I kind of got back into it a little bit — DJI put out this very little, tiny drone that's prebuilt … I started looking into it more, not knowing there was an enterprise side of it." Then he stumbled on videos of the company's T30 model — with a 30-liter tank, six propellers, six nozzles and a practical solution for row crops for farmers in Minnesota, he said. Curious about the possibilities for Lorain County, Moore and his mom signed up to attend DJI's AirWorks conference in Las Vegas under the name SkyEye, "so it sounded like we were legit," Moore said with a laugh. At the conference Moore met Agri Spray owner Taylor Moreland, he said, and was touched by the Missouri man's message of using drones to empower rural America. So, he bought an approximately $50,000 drone — a hard pill to swallow at first, but the way of the future for agriculture, he hopes. He compared it to the work he does as a nurse to identify a patient's illness based on unbalanced lab values. "We have to see an issue, recognize there's a problem and brainstorm, critically think what's influencing this level and what can we do to fix it?" he said. "So who hasn't been exposed to the problem of how expensive food has gotten? When I was a kid you could go to McDonald's and get a McDouble for a dollar. So why does a McDouble not cost a dollar anymore? Beef must've gotten so expensive. There's so many price increases in chemical cost, labor cost, water's costing more. … So that's the reality that's affecting us. … Anything we can do to try to eliminate these problems, the better." His drone, a DJI T40, required him to get a remote pilot's license and exemptions from the government — like being exempt from putting a seat belt on the aircraft, he said. But now, after months in the works, he's ready to survey fields, spray pesticides or fungicides and dispense cover crops. While it can't match the speed of a crop duster, he hopes to service smaller fields and farms often overlooked by larger aircraft. He said his service is comparable in price to crop dusters, and his drone can cover about 30 acres an hour. The size and design of the drone limits overspray — using fewer chemicals and preventing them from damaging nearby trees, or in his family's case, beehives, he said. "When I heard the environmental benefits of the drone, that's what sold it to me too — we can really help the planet, we can really help farmers and we can really have a solution that may be the best solution going forward," he said. Ohio State University field specialist and associate professor Elizabeth Hawkins studies Agronomic Systems and said drone use in agriculture is an emerging field. One of the biggest uses she sees is planting cover crops with drones — as traditional machinery has limitations in getting into fields, or requiring crops to be harvested before the cover is planted. "Cover crops are where the most excitement is," she said. "If you have to wait until you've already gotten crop off the field … a couple of weeks of can make a big difference." She said there is a trade-off that drones can't cover as many acres as aircraft, but she said at peak times those same aircraft can be difficult to contract. And the cost of entry for drones, compared to aircraft, is lower for budding businesses or farmers looking to care for their own fields. The regulations are still high, she said, but the OSU Extension she works at is starting to see startups like Moore's provide this as a service, especially for smaller farms. Those smaller farms are where Moore hopes to focus first, having already been in contact with a co-op in Erie County. But as his business grows, he hopes to branch out into even more emerging technology: using drones to provide solar inspections for solar farms, rather than relying on individuals on foot to inspect panels with thermal imaging cameras by hand. For more information on Moore's company, visit lakeeriedrone.com. Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.