- Will you "Consider This?"

A pair of entrepreneurs is taking AIM at farming, but it's probably far from what you may imagine.

I'm Christine Zak-Edmonds.

I'll AIM to make this clearer in just a bit.

(bright music) For all intents and purposes, we live in a flyover area of the country, but this has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with helping farmers check on their crops from above.

Brandon Jones and Andrew Farraher are co-founders of Focused-AIM, Autonomous Imaging and Monitoring, and they join me to explain.

Mouthful, welcome.

- Thank you.

- Thanks for having us.

- They even have their shirts on, so they're set to go.

We'll talk about Focused-AIM.

First, what is the idea behind it?

And who came up with it?

- So this was kind of a napkin stage idea, as they call it, back in April of this year I was reaching out to try to expand the offerings of my existing business, which is a real estate photography and videography company called DreamHouse Media.

And I met with somebody named, Nate Domenighini, back in April over coffee.

I had run into him at a AgTech meeting in Morton.

And what I was planning to do was try to find a way to scout crops with the drone flying it myself.

And he thought it was a great idea, and he asked me what would be the best way to scale that?

And I told him that scaling sounded like kind of a pain because we'd have to find a pilot in every territory.

And it's kind of difficult to find licensed drone pilots to do that type of work.

- [Christine] For acres and acres of land, right?

- Yeah, yeah, and it takes a lot of time, and there's a lot of battery swapping, and things like that.

I said, honestly, it doesn't sound that scalable.

We shook hands, or actually he said, "Well, what would make that easier?

What would make it easier to scale?"

And I said, "well, it'd be cool if the drones could fly themselves."

And then we shook hands.

We parted ways and a couple weeks went by, and I ended up finding out that there are self-flying autonomous drones out there being produced by a number of manufacturers.

And when I read the article that I read, I basically did a backflip.

I sent him an email three o'clock in the morning.

He got back to me pretty quickly, surprisingly, at three o'clock in the morning and said, "Why don't we link back up?

I think we have something that you might be interested in."

So he mentioned the gBeta program through Gener8tor, and said that they were interviewing companies in the Peoria area for the program.

And he said that we should interview.

- All right, so tell me about, do you know a lot about gBeta and Gener8tor?

- [Andrew] Absolutely.

- So explain that to me right now before we get a little bit more focused on AIM.

- Yeah, so gBeta is an accelerator program for startups.

It's run through a company called Gener8tor, who partnered with a local company called Distillery Labs.

So Distillery Labs and Gener8tor together put forth gBeta.

What gBeta does is it takes local companies regardless of their stages.

Brandon said we were kind of in a napkin stage.

There were a couple other companies that we went through the accelerator with that are collecting revenue, have some really big clients, and now they're looking to scale even further, but what they do is they put you through essentially a seven week bootcamp.

And, again, they meet you where you are, and then help you get to where you need to go.

So whether that's somebody like Brandon and myself where we're just trying to get this idea up and running, or somebody who is a little more advanced, and maybe they just need help securing some more funding, or something like that, but it's a really cool program.

They pair you with mentors who are well-versed in entrepreneurship and business, and that sort of thing.

And especially scalable businesses as Brandon alluded to.

It was a lot of fun.

It was definitely a wake-up call, made me realize some things that I didn't kind of realize were possible.

I always thought that a startup was a big multi-million, billion dollar venture.

And gBeta really helped us kind of as much as we wanna scale up, it helped us scale things down and make it very attainable.

- [Christine] Doable, right.

- Yeah.

- Then how did you two get together?

Before you even went to gBeta where did you two meet, and think, okay, we can work together?

- I think Andrew could probably touch on that, but we basically worked together at a local BNI chapter, met on a consistent basis.

I got to know Andrew.

He was the president of the chapter at the time.

I joined the chapter and I was working with somebody that he used to work for called Roof Tiger in Peoria.

And we were kind of helping them get their podcast, like, up to speed doing some video work for them.

And I became great friends with Andrew almost instantly.

He was already utilizing some of the fixes that I had for their podcast set up, and was just kind of like giving me the rundown, like, hey, he seemed very knowledgeable from a technical side and we just kind of clicked, and kept working together and keeping in touch.

And then what was it back in probably March?

- [Andrew] End of March, yeah.

- Decided to leave Roof Tiger and start his own thing.

He reached out to me.

Said that he was interested in kind of partnering up with me on the media side.

- [Christine] The DreamHouse Media, right.

- He was starting his new company called Playing in Peoria at the time and this was all kind of coming together, like I said, around April.

So since we were already partnering together in both of our businesses, I thought it was a good fit for having somebody to work with on this.

It's impossible to do it by yourself.

- So you're the brains behind the operation, and you're the marketing, or?

- Very much so, yeah.

- Is that how it's working?

- Yes, as much as I would love to take credit for this idea, I cannot.

Brandon is the brains behind the operation.

Since knowing Brandon, I've become a licensed FAA drone pilot as well as Brandon is, we're both licensed.

Obviously it makes a lot of sense for us in a drone company, but it was never something that would've been on my radar otherwise, but Brandon said, "Hey, there's this idea that I kinda stumbled upon.

I'm not really sure where it's gonna go, but I can't do this by myself and I need some help."

And, luckily, being in that exact timeframe, literally within, like, a week I had decided to kind of bet on myself, and start my own business as Brandon said, called Playing in Peoria where I help small businesses be known before needed, and help them with their social media strategy, and that sort of thing.

So like he said it was just really a natural fit.

It just made a lot of sense.

I have a background in sales, marketing, customer service, that sort of thing.

And so we make a really great pair.

Brandon covers the technical side of things, and I'm able to kind of handle our investor pitches, and things like that.

- Well, so that's interesting.

I knew from you a couple years ago that you had to be licensed to be a drone pilot, but not everybody is.

Is that just for commercial drones, or is that for every drone?

- Yeah, any time you're trading compensation of any sort for aerial photography or videography, or any kind of 3D modeling, or anything that drones can do, you need to be licensed by the FAA.

The fines are extraneous for getting caught operating commercially without a license, but it's also good even if you're just interested in drones as a hobby, I find that it's really useful to get your license just because you'll end up learning a lot of things that you wouldn't know as a hobbyist, like, how high up can you fly, how far can you go?

- Right, that was the question that I had.

So commercially, I guess you can fly higher.

Are there regulations to exactly what your airspace is, or how does that work?

- Yeah, so there's different airspaces depending on military facilities or airports.

Sporting events, things like that, will have, like, temporary, like, restrictions on airspace.

These are all things that you would learn when you go to get licensed.

400 feet above ground level is the limit for any drone pilot that's commercial or hobby.

A lot of people wouldn't know that, but I went way higher than I should have the first time I ever flew a drone 'cause just like everybody that ever talks to me about drones, the first question is, well, how high can it go?

How far can it go?

How fast does it fly?

These are all things that you end up testing on your own, but without the knowledge of what's actually legal, it can be very dangerous to fly something that weighs six, seven, eight pounds through the air at 45 miles an hour.

- [Christine] And then have it drop out of the sky.

- Right, right.

There's a lot of protections in place.

The software that runs these drones that are used for commercial purposes are very smart.

They're all GPS controlled.

A drone is connected to anywhere from 12 to 15 GPS satellites at a time.

So as soon as you let go of the controls, typically, a drone will just stop where it is, and it'll hover.

If it loses signal or anything like that, it'll come right back to you and land automatically.

- Really?

That's amazing.

Well, so now the FAA is in the process of reevaluating what your limits are when it comes to drone use?

- Yeah, as the laws and regulations are written right now, what they call beyond visual line-of-site operations are considered illegal.

You have to have a pilot onsite, and able to maintain visual sight with the drone, whether that's the pilot themselves, or if they have a team that kind of assists them along a flight path, that's doable as well.

What's changing, and it has been changing over the last 18 to 24 months or so, is that the FAA is working with some of these industry leaders who Brandon kind of alluded to, there's several manufacturers that are working on getting this drone autonomy up and running.

They've granted a few waivers to that beyond visual line-of-sight application.

And those companies are now practicing, and helping form the framework for what will be future legislation.

So right now there's obviously a lot of red tape to cut through, and things like that, but we anticipate over the next, like, two to five years, probably, somewhere in that range, the FAA is gonna have all of this stuff figured out, and drone autonomy is gonna be all over the place, whether it's agricultural applications, like what we're looking at, infrastructure inspections, things like that, or even just delivery packages.

Everybody's heard of Amazon and Google, and these things trying to set up drone deliveries, it's not gonna be long before that becomes a very regular thing.

- Just like "The Jetsons."

So you're from New York, you're from Central Illinois, but New York, you didn't have a whole lot of farmland to look at.

You had buildings and people 'cause you were near New York City.

Then you come here and you have just miles and miles, and miles of wide open spaces and crops.

So when did this little bell go off in your head, and buzz, buzz, buzz, you know?

I can make this work.

- Well, I mean, it's no secret that Central Illinois is surrounded by agriculture, right?

Like I said before, as we looked to expand my existing business, it just made sense to be kind of tapping into that market.

And the original goal was obviously to make more money, have more work, fly the drone more, make more money, but this idea has kind of changed.

We're really trying to help the agricultural community, and agriculture as a whole by providing a service that saves time, saves labor, saves money.

And so Peoria is just kind of a natural fit.

Like, we literally are in the center of Illinois, we're completely surrounded by.

- [Christine] Farmland.

- By farmland, so we have a pretty big sandbox to play with.

And after moving to Peoria from New York, I fell in love with Peoria.

I mean, you know, we are itching to come back.

I currently live in Chicago.

I just moved there a few months ago, but I'm back in Peoria pretty much once a week trying to handle business affairs, and meet back up with old friends and things like that.

Even if we scale this to the point that we're a global company, like, Peoria will always be home to Focused-AIM.

It's super important for us to make sure that the community's aware that we're here to help the local farmers and landowners.

- Well, so these drones autonomous, they will have a takeoff dock, and then they can go how far, and cover how much area?

They can be programmed, and then they'll come back safe and sound, right?

Is that how it works?

- Yeah.

The drones come in a weatherproof, tamperproof box that's about the size of your standard picnic table.

It houses itself, again, it's completely weatherproof.

And then once you've programmed it, you can tell it to fly a specific path at a specific time.

It'll release itself, fly that specific path until it's ran through its battery life, return to that charging dock, upload any data that it may have captured during that flight, and then also charge itself.

And I'll let Brandon talk about this, but the charging capabilities of these is pretty remarkable.

The big hangup with drone technology right now is battery life.

The drones use a lot of power in order to do what they do, and then the bigger the drone, the more power it uses.

- [Christine] Correct.

- So the charging capabilities are huge, but what's really unique about Focused-AIM is our ability to use these autonomous drones, and set them in a corner of a farm, or maybe in the middle of a farm as a central location, and that sort of thing, but I'll let you talk to kinda how the battery life works.

- Yeah, so the drone model that we're looking at, and we're looking at a couple, but the one that stands out to us the most has about a 45 minute flight time.

And it's completely weatherproof, so it can fly in hail, it can fly in rain, it can fly in 40 mile an hour winds.

It's able to travel about 45 miles an hour, 45, 50 miles an hour in perfect conditions.

So with a 45 minute flight time, once it lands, it only takes 23 minutes to charge.

That allows us to conduct 19, 20, maybe 21 flights in good conditions per 24-hour period.

So essentially you have constant monitoring, and this generates hundreds of thousands of really detailed photos through a variety of lenses that can check all kinds of things like infrared.

You can zoom in down to the plant level, and actually see pests.

You can count the dots on a ladybug from about 20 feet in the air.

- Really?

It's incredible.

- It's able to take hundreds of thousands of photos per flight, stitches 'em all together, gives us all kinds of data that we can utilize to kind of give a farmer a heads up on what kind of problems they might be facing from fungus to pests to.

- So it'll be able to determine if there's just groupings, or just areas that are only impacted that could spread farther.

- Exactly, and that's the goal, so what we're trying to do is cut back on chemical usage.

Right now as far as we know, most farms are sprayed three or four or five times a year depending on the part of the season that they're in.

And they spray the entire crop, regardless of whether there's an issue with the entire crop.

- Well, this way it could be focused.

Oh, there you go, focused, uh-huh.

- [Brandon] So, yeah, it's all coming together.

- Yeah.

- So basically that allows us to kind of target, and focus on specific areas of the crop to treat only those areas.

So, again, saving time, saving money, and saving chemical usage.

It's a very sustainable system the drone.

Since it is electric we're not wasting diesel fuel, we're not committing to carbon usage, so.

- [Christine] So you're going organic.

- Yeah.

- Okay, but so you need some funding, you need some backing to really get this thing off the ground, right?

So how do you approach that whole issue?

- It's been very interesting right now for us, 'cause that's as you mentioned, that's kind of where we're at right now is looking for kind of a seed investment to get us started because these drones they're not inexpensive, let's just put it that way.

- How many would you need?

- A fleet of probably two to three just to get us at least started.

We're hoping to start testing here this spring.

We've got a couple property owners that are willing to kind of allow us to use a segment of their property, kind of test and understand the real capabilities of these drones, and where problem areas that we may not be aware of are lying, and that sort of thing, but one of these drone systems alone, just the drone itself can be upwards of $25,000.

And then you start talking about the charging docks, and these sort of things.

So you're looking at a 50 to $75,000 investment just for one drone system.

- So you're putting some feelers out right now to find some investors.

How about farmers?

Have you had any interest, or have you spoken with anybody to see what the potential is there?

- Yeah.

And that's where things are really interesting right now.

The average age of a farmer in the U.S. is 57-1/2 years old.

- And they're not technology-minded.

- Exactly, and so you see one of two scenarios really with these aging farmers.

Either an aging farmer will leave that property to a son, or a nephew, or a cousin, or somebody like that who maybe is a little bit younger, and is looking to advance their farm, and be a little more efficient in these terms of chemicals, and time and labor, and that sort of thing, or you'll see a group of these farmers as they start to kind of retire conglomerate, and sell their farms off to a larger corporation.

- [Christine] A co-op.

- Or a co-op, exactly.

And so you see these two kind of scenarios, and so both are very excited about the capabilities because whether you're a younger generational farmer that's taking over, and you're looking to really maximize your profits, and your time, or if you're one of these co-op farmers that's looking to manage a large swath of land, this is a great opportunity for you to do that as well.

- Well, okay.

So how long do you think this will take to materialize?

You went through the I call it an incubator with Gener8tor, and where do you go from here?

I mean, you're already taking baby steps.

Do you think you just wanna continue taking your baby steps?

- Well, we're not in a major rush, right?

Because like we were saying the laws around autonomous flight.

- [Christine] Haven't changed yet.

- Haven't haven't changed yet.

There are a couple companies out there that have been given kind of what's called a permanent waiver because you can operate beyond visual line-of-sight, but you have to apply for a waiver, there's a process with the FAA to get that approved, but there's a couple companies that now have permanent waivers, so they're allowed to conduct beyond visual line-of-sight flights as much as they want.

- [Christine] Do they have the financial backing already to do so?

- Yes, there's major investors involved in kind of similar competing businesses such as ours, like Koch Industries, Boeing, Microsoft.

- The big guys.

- Yeah, so there's money out there, and there's definitely investment going into this, so.

Our steps right now are trying to basically get all our ducks in a row from a legal standpoint to make sure that as we gain investment that we're protecting ourselves, we're protecting our investors.

Coming up with a plan to start testing the beginning of next growing season.

So to get a system in our hands over the next few months here that requires capital, right?

So the sooner we can get money in our hands to purchase some equipment, and some software and start testing in spring, that's our next step that we have our heads down, and that's what we're focused on right now.

- And just to give you kind of an idea of how this space is moving, and when we did our pitch night for the gBeta program.

- [Christine] That was in September.

- Yes, that was in September.

When we did that, I kind of used the old adage where there's smoke there's fire.

So I mentioned before there's a lot of evidence pointing towards the FAA kind of loosening these restrictions.

So just to give you an idea, Brandon talked about, you know, some of the investments.

Between these various companies that we've mentioned there's been over $100 million invested in these companies just over the last 18 months or so.

So, again, when you talk about where there's smoke there's fire, there's obviously something going on kind of behind the scenes where we feel like we're in a really unique position to where once we are ready to go, these legalities and these regulations will have been updated to where we can hit the ground running, and kind of stop taking baby steps.

- Which is really kind of exciting.

And then what does the future look like if and when this gets going?

And you said that you have a lot of different people, innovative people who are coming to the fore, and involved with Distillery Labs, and Gener8tor and gBeta.

I mean, I gotta get all these terms down, but so everybody's kind of thinking ahead, just, again, maybe not baby steps, but at least a step forward.

- Yeah, so one of the things that we talked about, and that we would love to get to a point to where this is feasible is to utilize existing infrastructure, like power lines out in these rural areas to develop a network of drones.

So I mentioned the charging station, if we're able to place a charging station, say on a telephone pole somewhere in the middle of Warren County, that drone or team of drones can utilize the same charging station.

We can cover a really vast area.

I'm gonna make up a number here.

Put a charging station every two miles down the road, or so on depending on the property, right?

And really develop a huge network.

So when you say what does the future look like five, 10, 15 years from now?

I think that's what it looks like is a team of drones kind of using a centralized location to manage multiple properties, or one large property.

- [Christine] And hope that they all get along.

- [Andrew] Yeah, exactly.

- [Brandon] Exactly.

- Kinda like kids.

Well, that would be very interesting to have that happen.

And then, so how big would the platform be?

I mean, obviously, you'd have to have it all, and, Brandon, you'd probably have to do this, you'd have to have it all programmed so that two aren't coming in at the same time, and charging and all that.

- There's an incredible amount of artificial intelligence already being implemented in this type of technology.

So essentially what we tell people is we're not so much, like, reinventing the wheel.

- The hardware and software already exists.

- [Christine] It's already in place.

- So we're integrating it.

We are innovating as far as how it's used.

So we're kind of thinking outside the box of like he said building a vast network of drones, but because they're all GPS controlled, and computer controlled, and AI controlled, the kind of, like, collisions and things like that are obviously already thought about.

They're already avoided.

There's swarming technology.

I don't know if you guys have seen some of the stuff that, like, Intel has done where they're actually creating, like, air shows out of, like, thousands and thousands of drones are able to do faces and 3D objects and things like that.

It's kind of the New Age, like, fireworks.

Those drones don't collide, and those drones are really, really close to each other.

All that stuff is obviously stuff that we have to think about and be careful about, but everything's gonna be controlled from a central location, and there's gonna be a team of people that will be monitoring all of the flights that are happening.

- So how big a team would you want?

If you start right away, let's say with three drones, are the two of you adequate, or do you need more people at that point?

- We'll be looking to hire people.

We kind of took this company from the beginning stages of an idea, and now we understand that there's a team of professionals that can handle this kind of stuff.

As much as I know about the industry I'm not an expert.

And there are experts out there.

There's engineers, there's software people, there's these people that can handle this type of stuff.

So part of the process of us raising funds is to make sure that we're able to hire people that will help us get off the ground, right?

That's what's super important to us right now is just having the ability to find the right team, find the right partnerships.

We have several meetings every week.

We have reached out to so many people, and people are really, really excited about what we're trying to do, so.

- It is very exciting.

Well, where does anybody get in touch with you?

Focused-AIM you have it all on your shirts.

Where would anybody get in touch with you to find out more information, to tell you they're interested?

Ask more questions.

- I think the quickest way would probably be our social media, Facebook, send us a message on Facebook at Focused-AIM.

We're pretty easy to find, but we're also very responsive to email, and our emails are easy to remember.

It's andrew@focusedaim.co, not.com, .co.

And brandon@focusedaim.co.

So, pretty easy to remember we're not too hard to find.

We're in the process of developing our website, and that sort of thing where people can kind of find us a little more organically, but, again, as a startup, that's kind of one of the things that we're kind of working through in these initial stages.

- Well, you guys you're going in the right direction, I think, you know, and this is 2022.

This will air in 2023, so onward and upward as they say.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for sharing the story, and look forward to some more of the progress.

- [Brandon] Thanks Chris.

- Thanks.

- And thank you for joining us.

I'll see you next time.

Stay safe and healthy and hold happiness.

(bright music)