{"id":6597,"date":"2023-07-24T15:16:45","date_gmt":"2023-07-24T15:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/?p=6597"},"modified":"2023-07-24T15:16:45","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T15:16:45","slug":"drone-averse-kentucky-is-warming-to-uavs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/drone-averse-kentucky-is-warming-to-uavs\/","title":{"rendered":"Drone Averse Kentucky is Warming to UAVs"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nThe \u201cBluegrass State\u201d of Kentucky isn\u2019t known for being friendly to drones.\u00a0 The Virginia-based Mercatus Center, which evaluates all 50 states based on their readiness to promote the drone industry, ranks Kentucky near the bottom of the list at #43.\u00a0 Other Deep South states share Kentucky\u2019s concern that drones could spy on local citizens or infringe upon property rights.\u00a0 But Kentucky, like South Carolina, has been especially resistant to realizing the many commercial benefits of drones.<\/p>\n

One example:\u00a0 Thanks to a state law passed just two years ago, it\u2019s still illegal to fly a drone anywhere near an oil pipeline or a power grid, even though inspection drones \u2013 widely deployed in other US states \u2013 could save these companies time and money, and likely reduce consumer energy fees, too.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just the private sector:\u00a0 Barely a dozen of the state\u2019s law enforcement agencies have acquired a single drone for widely accepted public safety benefits such as expedited search and rescue and enhanced crime and accident scene analysis.\u00a0 In fact, Kentucky accounts for just 1% of the more than 1,600 police and fire department agencies that currently deploy drones. There are some exceptions:\u00a0 Louisville, the state\u2019s largest city, has been experimenting with a program that automatically deploys a drone to the site of gunfire.\u00a0 The ShotSpot system is controversial.\u00a0 It tends to target minority neighborhoods and dispatches a drone without the benefit of eyewitness reporting that a crime has occurred.\u00a0 But after four years of pilot testing, and citing reductions in murders and violent assaults, the city swears by its drone-enhanced system and now wants to see it expanded and made permanent.<\/p>\n

There are other signs that Kentucky is warming to drones. Later this fall, the state plans to incorporate drones into its flood and storm damage surveys, thanks to a grant it received several months ago from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).\u00a0 The Louisville division of the National Weather Service (NWS) has already purchased a new fleet of drones and has begun training a team of operators to deploy them.\u00a0 The enhanced aerial imagery derived from drones, equipped with advanced photogrammetry cameras, will allow the Louisville NWS branch to create 3-D maps to help predict future flooding and to estimate its likely impacts, reducing the scope of property damage and minimizing the loss of life.<\/p>\n

But the biggest drone breakthrough in Kentucky is actually occurring in one of the state\u2019s largest economic sectors:\u00a0 agriculture.\u00a0 The state has vast farmland dedicated to corn and soybeans and to a lesser extent, tobacco.\u00a0 It also has a huge livestock industry, with a special niche in horse breeding (and racing) and a significant investment in cattle..\u00a0 Drones elsewhere in the South, including Georgia, are engaged in \u201cprecision\u201d techniques for analyzing soil fertility and crop stress and for seeding, fertilizing and spraying crop land to reduce labor and input costs and to increase farm yields.\u00a0 Drones can also help herd and maintain livestock, reducing threats from predators and preventing losses due to breaches in fencing.<\/p>\n

Kentucky is about to become a major AgTech hub not only in the South but nationwide.\u00a0 In 2020, the state\u2019s Republican governor set up a consortium consisting of 16 different countries contributing to the state\u2019s agricultural expansion with the introduction of some of the latest technologies for growing and maintaining crops.\u00a0 A key focus of the AgTech hub is robotics, including an expansion of drones for precision agriculture to boost the state\u2019s farm yields.<\/p>\n

A dozen of the state\u2019s universities are involved in some fashion in the consortium, which also links to a separate \u201cDrone Port USA\u201d hub in the eastern part of the state. Drone Port USA is intended to stimulate drone progress across numerous sectors of the Kentucky economy.\u00a0 In the short term, it could help transform the Bluegrass State into an even larger producer of soybeans, corn and chicken, but also make Kentucky a global leader in a wide array of state-of-the-art agricultural technologies.<\/p>\n

Kentucky still has a long way to go to catch up with other US states on the cutting edge of the burgeoning drone industry.\u00a0 But the investments being made now will soon pay enormous dividends and will likely inspire other states, especially those in the Deep South, to explore what drones can do for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cBluegrass State\u201d of Kentucky isn\u2019t known for being friendly to drones.\u00a0 The Virginia-based Mercatus Center, which evaluates all 50 states based on their readiness to promote the drone industry, ranks Kentucky near the bottom of the list at #43.\u00a0 Other Deep South states share Kentucky\u2019s concern that drones could spy on local citizens or… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6597"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}