The 2020 Ag Aviation Expo, which kicked off this week in Savannah amid conditions unlike any NAAA has ever faced during its 53 previous annual conventions, has proceeded safely, smoothly and substantively over the first three days of the four-day show.
NAAA Kickoff Speaker Future-casts a Wide Net
NAAA Kickoff Breakfast speaker Damian Mason shows off his two latest books.
The convention got off to a flying start at Monday’s Kickoff Breakfast with an address by Damian Mason, an agricultural economist, futurist, author, podcaster and comedian. At root, Mason is a trained professional observer, and he credits his comedy background for honing his powers of observation. “To be a comedian is to be a professional observer,” he said. “That’s what comedy is: observation, report your perspective, deliver a punchline.”
Mason generated several laughs throughout his address as he shared his perspectives on where he sees the business of agriculture headed. He did so by making a series of predictions.
PREDICTION: Consumer preferences are going to reshape what agriculture produces and how it produces those goods.
“We work for customers. And these customers are going to have a greater and greater influence on how we do what we do in the business of agriculture moving forward,” Mason said.
Social consciousness and social awareness are going to drive consumers moving forward. The hardships of 2020 notwithstanding, “We live in a generally thriving economy where most people have all their needs met.” More and more people, particularly millennials, are buying products now that make them feel good about themselves, Mason said.
PREDICTION: Mason sees half the number of farmers 10 years from now than there are today.
There are about 2 million farmers in the U.S. on 3.2 million farms. Out of that, roughly 105,000 farmers grew 75% of all the crop revenue in the 2017 ag census. “The farmers that you serve broadly in productive agriculture, there’s going to be even less of them because commodity production has always favored scale and efficiency of production,” Mason said.
PREDICTION: Contractual production arrangements will expand for commodities.
“What if instead of the farmer making the decision about whether to go ahead and treat fungicide on all those acres, it is a company that has 200,000 acres under contract that's not making those decisions?” Mason said. “I believe your customer decision-maker is going to change in the next five years if these business models change.”
PREDICTION: “I see more government in ag.”
That means some cropping practices are going to change. A combination of regulation and government incentives is going to change how aerial applicators get to treat those acres.
PREDICTION: “Environmentalism is going to have more of a voice than it’s ever had.”
“I believe that in the future, we’ll have less synthetic fertilizer and less usage of herbicide, insecticide, fungicide,” Mason said. “We are using way less chemical per acre than we used to. And that probably will continue. That doesn’t mean there's not a place for you. In fact, it probably intensifies the need for you because you're the professional. You’re the experts. You are the people and the technicians to input the precise amount of product per acre with the least amount of impact on the environment. And that’s exactly how you need to sell yourself, position yourself on public relations.”
PREDICTION: There will be less tillage in the future.
Mason expects that to be driven in part by the environmental lobby but also because it is the right thing to do agronomically. “Tillage, we're learning more and more, destroys soil structure. Tillage creates erosion,” he said.
PREDICTION: Cover crop planting will continue to increase.
“I think we're going to see more living organisms, more cover cropping, from a voluntary business-minded standpoint, but also it could be by government decree. Usually, it’s better to do it on our own before we're forced to do it,” Mason said.
PREDICTION: The autobots are coming.
“When I look at the future, I see autonomous machinery. … Autonomous is going to come to your business as well,” Mason said. He foresees fleets of drones spraying fields.
PREDICTION: America will produce less corn in the future.
“I believe that we’re going to see a situation where corn is decreasingly produced in the United States, certainly on marginal acres,” Mason said. Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. grew two-thirds of the world’s corn; last year that was down to one-third, he said. Mason expects demand for U.S. corn to continue to decrease for a variety of reasons.
PREDICTION: Niche/specialty farming is going to continue to expand.
As farmers’ crop mix evolves, “You are going to be called upon as industry to treat acres in a different way and different products than you have before,” Mason said.
Mason knows he is not going to bat a thousand on his predictions. “If I’m only half right that still means we've got to make adjustments. One thing you should never forget: Dominant today means nothing tomorrow.”
General Session
On Tuesday, the NAAA General Session examined legal, medical and food trends occurring in the ag aviation industry nationally. Aviation attorney John Wright participated by Zoom and started things off by discussing a pair of legal cases he tried in Colorado between an aggressive state government agency and two reputable aerial applicators. Agri Marketing magazine publisher Lynn Henderson also Zoomed in to provide an overview of how the landscape is changing within the food and agriculture sectors. Dr. Stan Musick, an aviator and AME, took the stage in person to cover several medical topics relevant to ag pilots, including over-the-counter drugs’ potency, fatigue and how to get a medical special issuance.
Wright is the founding attorney of the Law Office of John L. Wright PC, in Broomfield, Colorado, and the general counsel for the Colorado Agricultural Aviation Association. He also has an agreement with NAAA to provide up to one hour of legal consultation to 2020 NAAA operator and pilot members on federal aviation laws. He addressed the importance of maintaining good applicator records to keep aerial application operations in the air. He walked attendees through two cases that he successfully defended in which the operators had been accused of drifting onto a neighboring landowner’s property.
What made the cases so vexing for the operators and a challenge for Wright was the amount of time that passed between each of the alleged drift incidents. In the first case example, involving a drift claim from a 2012 application the operator made, more than two years had passed before the operator received notice of possible charges from the state, five years passed between the application in question and the actual notice of charges, and almost seven years had elapsed from the time of the application to the operator’s hearing date. Another applicator received notice of charges three years after being accused of drift. The applicator got his day in court four to five years after making the 2014 application in question.
Ultimately, both operators’ meticulously detailed record-keeping set them free. They not only still had those records on file, but specific details they recorded about the application job and weather conditions jogged their memory, enabling them to recall details about an application job that had been nowhere near the front of their mind any longer. That would have been difficult to do without meaningful notes.
“Most important is not just that we have all these, but that we’re keeping an adequate record of it so that you can speak to it,” Wright said. “The judge is trying to ascertain who he can believe.”
Wright counseled operators to hang on to their records indefinitely, even for as much as 10 years. After that, if you haven’t gotten an enforcement notice by then, you probably won’t, but the statute of limitations is very long in some states, he said.
Henderson’s presentation touched on the new investments in ag and food technology, including investments by outside venture capitalists and acquisitions by agricultural conglomerates. He also listed the top five global trends shaping the food industry in 2021 predicted by the consulting firm ADM, which include:
- A more proactive approach to nourishing our body and mind.
- Sustainability takes center stage.
- A whole new way of looking at our diets. (“We’re going to be looking at what are we ingesting that can continue to make us feel well,” Henderson said.)
- The plant-based food boom is going to continue to expand.
- Who are consumers going to trust?
Henderson also said that investments in AgTech are projected to increase to $22.5 billion by 2025.
During the final leg of the General Session, Dr. Musick covered several medical topics, including the potency and half-lives of over-the-counter drugs, the dangers of fatigue and how to get a medical special issuance. It’s not just a lack of sleep that will negatively affect pilots; sleep disruption is problematic too.
“Sleep hygiene is helpful,” Musick noted. He offered several fatigue mitigation strategies including for pilots to limit their alcohol consumption. Obstructive sleep apnea affects 40 to 50% of adult males, he added. Addressing that has made a world of difference for his patients in terms of increased energy and performance in the cockpit and, ahem, elsewhere on the home front.
News & Notes
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The Aerial Application Technology Research Session was held on Monday along with several more educational sessions that took place on Sunday, Monday and Wednesday.
- The NAAA Trade Show on Tuesday and Wednesday featured approximately 100 exhibitors, including three fixed-wing ag planes and two rotorcraft on display.
- Twenty-two companies and individuals donated items to Tuesday’s NAAA Live Auction, including a brand-new PT6A-34AG engine donated by Pratt & Whitney Canada and purchased by winning bidder John Pew of Sarita Aerial Contractors Inc. in Arizona (pictured below).
More in-depth coverage of the 2020 Ag Aviation Expo will be featured in next week’s eNewsletter and the next issue of Agricultural Aviation.
