• Sue Roesler

Red Iron Air drones can spray in hard-to-reach areas.

SIMMS, Mont. – Taylor Woods, a U.S. veteran, has started a business using unmanned aerial vehicles or drones to fit a niche market with commercial spraying in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Idaho.

After serving a tour in Afghanistan, Woods wanted to start his own business in 2019. He knew there were commercial operators with drones that were tackling the big jobs in crop production, but he saw a niche with eliminating weeds on ranch rangeland and pastures that are hard to get to – the perfect areas for drones to fly in and out of.

Woods named the business “Red Iron Air,” and he will have a booth at the MAGIE demonstrating the services he and his team provides farmers and ranchers. He was recently at the MATE in Billings.

“We want to let ranchers and farmers know what we can do for them with commercial pesticide and insecticide spraying,” he said.

Woods is also a technician and repairs large ag drones. Red Iron Air also sells drones and uses the big drones for commercial spraying.

“We do aerial spraying with both American and Chinese drones. We don’t do a lot of row crops. We’re doing a lot more pasture or smaller fields, spraying either herbicides or pesticides. We do a lot of the smaller work that your standard big ground sprayer can’t get in and access,” he said.

Woods explained where they “shine” with drone sprayers is spraying insecticide on weevils on an alfalfa crop, for example. The area to be sprayed is mapped first so the drone is programmed to follow the map as it sprays. The mapping allows for no chemical waste.

“That is a good choice for us where we could come in and do a whole 160-acre field because we don’t have to run over it like a large sprayer would – causing compaction and losing some yield,” he said.

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Woods said they offer a variety of cutting-edge herbicide and pesticide applications, ranging from a fifth of a gallon to 10 gallons per acre. His standard drone carries five gallons, and the large ones carry 10 gallons.

“With the 10-gallon drones, I can spray five acres every seven minutes,” he said.

When they are called for a job, it has to be enough acreage for them to make it worth their while.

“We are currently doing a lot of pasture work for producers on these big ranches, Fish and Wildlife, parks, and we do a lot of work for the side of the Oxbow Mountain where you’d have to call in a chopper or you could call us,” he said.

Recently, Woods worked for a rancher outside of Wolf Creek, spraying cheatgrass, which is really hard to kill, he noted.

“We sprayed a lot of cheatgrass for him, trying to clean up field edges and then higher mountain pastures. We’re using a chemical called Rejuve and then a fall chemical called Battalion Pro. Battalion Pro is an organic chemical,” he said. “It is nice using the drones because they are so accurate on the amount they dispense and we never over spray.”

Red Iron Air does a lot of drone seeding for the bigger ranches that allow logging to go on on the ranch. When the businesses finish logging, there are a lot of ruts and trails they leave behind. Woods will reseed those areas and return them to grazing.

“We will go in and reseed those areas where before, guys would have to carry a 55-pound bag of seed on their back and hand spread it,” he said. “That’s another one where we have a niche and are able to help out other producers or bigger ranches that have loggers that come in and do some logging, so we can improve grazing for them.”

Red Iron Air’s business has substantially increased since it opened in 2019. In fact, they started selling and repairing big ag drones.

“From when we started in 2019 to now, we can’t keep up, so we actually had to start selling drones, as well as fixing them. I’m the only DGI drone technician in the state that I’m aware of,” he said.