JOHN TAYLOR, REPORTER: In the age-old struggle between farmers and pests, there's a new weapon. You might call it a drone or even a toy, but aviation types prefer to call it an aerial vehicle, or AV for short.
NATHAN ROY, AEROBUGS: It's gonna be the only way that the beneficial bugs are gonna be dispensed in the future.
JOHN TAYLOR: It's the latest addition to the arsenal of biological pest control, using drones to spread good predatory insects over farmland so they can kill bad insects that would otherwise eat the crops, which could take the use of predatory insects from a labour-intensive and expensive niche market to the mainstream.
DAN PAPACEK, BUGS FOR BUGS: And that's been a real hurdle for us because we get these great biocontrol agents and we get them out to our growers and then they often find that it's a bit laborious, you know.
JOHN TAYLOR: For farmers, it promises an easy alternative or option to using chemicals.
MERV SCHIFFKE, TASTE 'N' SEE: All your insects and all your stuff there, they can adapt quickly and get resistance to chemicals, but they can't get resistance from some little critter eating them. JOHN TAYLOR: After years of using beneficial insects on his own crops, one man had an idea. So in the past 18 months, Nathan Roy from the Sunshine Coast has gone from being a strawberry farmer to pest control innovator, with his own company, Aerobugs. And how much work has gone into making this look so easy?
NATHAN ROY: Hundreds of hours. Literally hundreds of hours, eh?
JOHN TAYLOR: An idea on the farm has led to this: an eight-bladed aerial vehicle called an octocopter. It can reach speeds of more than 100 kilometres an hour. But Nathan Roy's innovative idea has been what a drone can be used for: spreading beneficial insects. And the real work has gone into developing a bag for the drone to carry and spread insects. This one was about number two or three, wasn't it, Nath?
NATHAN ROY: Yeah, two.
WOMAN: This one — I actually made this with my sewing machine out of fabric I found at Spotlight. This was actually a saucer for a pot plant which we cut the insides out of.
NATHAN ROY: I went to Bunnings and that's where I got all the parts from. So, um — and I trialled it with rice and it dispensed the rice perfect, but it was just — it nearly flew apart on the test run, so I had to rebuild it. So, yeah.
JOHN TAYLOR: Wow. A lot of patents and proprietary secrets later, can-do country people have a machine, but no farm. Why did you get out of strawberry farming?
NATHAN ROY: Oh, there's a lot of strawberries grown in Australia and we're actually a small farm compared to other farms, so it wasn't commercially viable to continue to farm strawberries.
JOHN TAYLOR: Just the margins too tight?
NATHAN ROY: Yes. So continually having to streamline and one of the ways for streamlining was to spread beneficial insects with the UAV instead of using workers to do it.
JOHN TAYLOR: Has it been easier or harder than you thought it would be?
NATHAN ROY: No, it's been quite difficult. The hard part is getting all the licensing together. That's been probably the hardest part of all. So we started our licensing May last year and it wasn't until June this year that we were able to have our licence approved from CASA.
JOHN TAYLOR: This year, Nathan and his colleague Glenn began trialling their work on Merv Schiffke's farm.
MERV SCHIFFKE: He said, ""Oh, we could put these things up with the drones,"" So we said, ""Yeah, we'll give it a go."" So this year we started with them, putting 'em out with the drone.
JOHN TAYLOR: So what do you have here, Nathan?
NATHAN ROY: This is the vermiculite. This is what we use for the medium to spread the bugs with.
JOHN TAYLOR: And why do you use this?
NATHAN ROY: It's a great light material for — so the bugs can attach, they crawl all over it and when you dispense, they sort of use that as a way of getting from the craft to the ground, so they just crawl all over the vermiculite everywhere.
JOHN TAYLOR: The next thing is to add the predatory insects.
NATHAN ROY: That's the insects that we get from the insectary. So that's persimilis there.
JOHN TAYLOR: And how many are in there?
NATHAN ROY: Approximate 50,000.
JOHN TAYLOR: Wow.
NATHAN ROY: So that's enough for one hectare.
JOHN TAYLOR: And they're all alive, as you can see them moving.
NATHAN ROY: You can see 'em crawling around the edge, so you have to keep giving 'em a bit of a tap to try and keep 'em down.
JOHN TAYLOR: The bag has a spreader at its base which throws out a measured dose of insects and vermiculite as it flies. The key to success has been finding the Goldilocks spot in the sky — how high the AV should work above the crops. Too high and not enough bugs get where they need to be. Too low and there's too many. There's also time of day, humidity, wind, powerlines and interested people.
NATHAN ROY: And typical pickers. They'll always stop and stand in one spot when they see it, so we try and clear the area beforehand, but you'll often get the silly one that'll walk across the paddock because he wants a closer look.
JOHN TAYLOR: The history of Australian farming is one of constant innovation, constantly seeking to do things better, cheaper and easier. To spread beneficial insects over this field by hand would take a number of people hours, yet with an unmanned aerial vehicle, just minutes. On the ground, as he manages his strawberry farm, the farmer Merv Schiffke sees plenty of potential.
MERV SCHIFFKE: Oh, yeah, it'd be better for everybody. Less miles on our legs. (Laughs) No. Yeah, no, no, it's just a more economical way and probably a better way of putting them out. You can get a good even spread of your predatory insects.
DAN PAPACEK: We're helping the Australian farming community reduce their dependence on pesticides and that's got to be a good thing.
NATHAN ROY: There's a lot of farms around the place that will say that it does work.
JOHN TAYLOR: And how big are your dreams?
NATHAN ROY: Pretty big.