Drones & Beneficial Insect Release

Drones are used for a variety of services, but one you might not have heard of is to release beneficial insects by air to manage pest control as an alternative to chemical pesticides. In this case to combat spider mites that feed on corn by using predatory mites that feed on the spider mites, which can be a serious threat to crops.

Verbatim:

“My name is Jake Pool and I'm the owner of Terravata, and I work full time for Ag Idaho Consulting based out of Homedale, Idaho. My employer with Ag Idaho, a few years back asked if I wanted to start a drone business together and so we started that about three years ago,” said Jake Pool of Terravata Drone Services.

Terravata is a company that uses drones for a variety of services, but one you might not have heard of is to release beneficial insects to manage pest control. In this case to combat spider mites that feed on corn by using predatory mites that feed on the spider mites, which can be a serious threat to crops.

“Yeah, they can get really nasty and they're called a spider mite because when they start to increase their populations, they'll actually create spider like webbing on the leaves. And they will lay their eggs in that,” said Pool.

“With the heat and dry climate that we have here, they reproduce really quickly. So they can go from adult to an egg back to an adult within a week and they just multiply in numbers in a in a really quick time frame.”

“All the sap and nutrients they feed on that out of the leaf, and it turns this leaf a bronze color and it makes it harder for the plants to photosynthesize, so they're producing more energy into creating new leaves rather than, for example, this corn, rather than producing energy into the into the kernel development on the ears… And they can be really yield limiting and they're not just a problem in corn, they’re problem in a lot of the crops that we have. They're a big problem in hops, in mint, a lot of our seed crops will even get them in sugar beets. They can be really tricky to kill.”

“We've been doing beneficial insect releases for a number of years now. Traditionally in years past we would have crews of workers go out in the field with these small bottles and they would just release them by hand and it was a very like, cumbersome and time consuming process. So we found a company called Para Bug based out of Salinas, California and they have a patented system that holds the insects and releases them over the field that you can attach to a drone. So we partnered up with Para bug about 3 years ago.”

The predatory mite being released here is called “Californicus,” a natural predator to spider mites, so small they’re hard to see with the naked eye.

“We do a lot of work here in Idaho from May through mid-August and then we spend our winters down in California doing applications on strawberries controlling the same pest which is the two-spotted spider mite. And we're releasing predatory mites on those as well, they're just a different species. Those ones are called “Persimilis.”

“I do this kind of full time between my job at Ag Idaho as an agronomist. And then I have an employee named Mason who also works with us full time and he spends a lot of his time traveling throughout the state and doing these applications as well.”

“So typically the spider mites they like to spread with the dust and with the wind. So if you're near like a gravel road or a dusty road that gets a lot of traffic, typically your mite pressure will start on that area and work in from the edges of the field in towards the center. So we have some growers and fields that we only do half of the field, like the outer 50%. So that's what we did on this one. I went through, I mapped out the field and then I just sent boundary points around the center to where we could only apply that outer 50% of the field and get a heavier concentration of those predator mites over on the outside perimeter where those spider mites typically start to show up.”

And just where do they get those predatory mites?

“There’s a number of insectaries in the country that we’ll work with.”  

Insectaries are facilities for rearing beneficial insects to be used for biological pest control in agriculture. They’re shipped in a carrier material that gives them a temporary habitat during transit.

”So most the insectaries, they'll pack their insects with cold packs in the packaging. And then fortunately for us, we have a facility, a cold storage facility that runs year-round. It's held at about 44 to 45 degres. So upon receivable they go straight in there and we don't like to let them sit for more than 24 hours. Typically they can last in there five to six days, but we like to get them released as soon as possible.”

Many of the insectaries are here in the United States, but some are shipped from much farther away.

“Some of our predatory mites that we use to control the two spotted spider mites come out of Israel.” “So, they made a long journey to get here.” They did, yeah.”

“Typically, when we're doing those predator mites, we'll be doing 10 acres per load, and that's just about enough time to where you have 20 to 30% battery life on your drone, so you've got plenty of time to come back and land. In a day if the fields are all relatively close to each other, you can do about two to 300 acres per drone and I have a handful of these Agras T-10s that we use and a couple pilots, so we're able to tackle quite a few acres in a day.”

“Another thing that we'll do in the hops is if it gets really hot out like 90 – 95 degrees, we'll pause our operations until night until the sun comes down and it starts to cool off and that way we're not shocking these insects from going from a relatively cool temperature to extreme heat. So it kind of gives them some more time to acclimate, to scurry under the leaves and kind of find some habit. Tat and just be ready for when that sun comes out the next day, so we do a lot of nighttime applications as well.”

They feed on all stages of the spider mites from eggs to adults.

Terravata also release other kinds of predatory insects for a variety of pests.

 “I look at the beneficial insect release as just another tool in your tool belt. I think that there's always going to be a need for pesticide usage, but what this does is a lot of times we see some of these spider mites develop a resistance to the miticides that we use often, and so this is just another tool that we can come in early when we start to have a pest presence early season and we'll come in and release these and we try to make them really affordable, comparable to the same cost of like a miticide that would be applied.”

“A lot of people still don't know about it, so I just I enjoy educating the general public, whether it's farmers or not. I just kind of like talking about what I do.

You know, we're out releasing insects and a common question is what do we do when they run out of food source? And I mean, the answer is… they're a lot of these species are native to our area. So we're not inducing a non-native species. And if they don't have a food source, they're just not going to generate anymore and they'll eventually die off. But yeah, one of my favorite parts about this is being able to open up all these bottles and show the growers what these predatory mites or other beneficial insects that we're releasing and get the drone up in the air and show them the camera view and kind of all the capabilities and technology that's built into this drone.

And yeah, you have a lot of a lot of curiosity and questions that come up, but I try to do my best to answer them.”

So the next time you notice a drone flying over some crops, it might be releasing these tiny mites coming to do battle with the unwelcome invaders in our fields.