Let's begin.

In our first lesson of this chapter, let's take a look at the application cases in Europe. This information will be relevant for pilots coming from UK as well. 

The main use cases of spraying drones are in farming, in forestry, as well as they have industrial and sanitary application.

Let me remind you that spraying drone industry is very young and innovative industry, therefore many other application cases may appear in the nearest future. 

Let's take a detailed look at the application cases throughout Europe.

In general, since the aerial spraying of pesticides in most EU countries and UK is prohibited, the use cases are limited to spraying of fertilizers, microelements, biostimulants, microbiological products and straw decomposition products. 

So far we can say these are great news for most organic farmers, which are looking to increase the crop yield using currently available bioproduct range or using home-made products.

From our own experience, the agricultural drone technology is ideally suitable for such bioproduct application. 

Only in a small number of EU countries the farmers are allowed to spray pesticides. Spraying pesticides has been proven to be very effective drone application all over the world - in North and South America, Asia, Australia, Africa basically everywhere except European union and the North Pole. We do expect legalization of pesticide application by drones in the nearest future, but it is still very unclear when this might happen in Europe. In order to spray pesticides, the sprayer, in this case the drone, has to be tested and certified for such purpose, just like tractor sprayer. Also, the pesticide product has to be certified for aerial spraying. Basically, the pesticide spraying will go ahead when all puzzle pieces are put together - we must have a individual country permit to spray, plus procedure to certify drones equipment for spraying pesticides and the product itself, which must be designed for aerial spraying.

Needless to say, once the pesticide ban is lifted, the interest and demand for drone spraying will increase rapidly and we have to be ready for this.

Furthermore, there are numerous application cases for cover crop and catch crop spreading. We expect this activity to be in very high demand all over European countries as spreading cover crops seeds is included in many countries Green deal program.

In the seed spreading scenario the drones are far superior to the tractor based equipment as they allow to spread seeds exactly at the right moment before harvesting, normally 3-4 weeks before harvesting, they don't damage the standing crops and can be used to spread seeds straight after the rain when the soil is in perfect condition for seed germination.

In our opinion seed spreading is the number one use case for agricultural drones in Europe and deserves farmer, service company and investor attention.

In fact, more than 90% of requests we received over the last year were associated with spreading of seeds, which was efficiently performed our drones.

Other use cases are granulated fertilizer spreading, entomophague spreading, e.g. trichogramma, and limacide granule spreading against slugs and snails. Please note pesticide spreading is prohibited in most countries as well.

Another use case is forestry. Just as we discussed in the farming section, the fertilizer spraying is a good use case in forestry. Also spraying of animal repellent is frequent use case for tree nurseries.

And finally planting trees is also possible by spreading the seeds. 

As the bark beetle forest infestation spreads all over Europe, we do expect some countries to allow insecticide spraying with drones, which will open a completely new specialized segment of spraying drone market. Given the current rate of forest infestation and no timely actions taken in the fight against the barkle beetle, we are in risk of losing all our woodland in a matter of a decade. Basically, now is a good time to take action.

Industrial application of drones gives an opportunity to clean the solar panels, spray specific products on building roofs and transportation of agriculture related products to and from the field. We found most popular application case to be painting of greehnouse roofs, especially in countries like Germany and UK. Painting greenhouses with the use of drones is much safer and much quicker way than traditional manual labour.

Sanitary use of drones, which is not really relevant to EU countries, is street disinfection and anti-malaria treatment of endemic areas.

This is not exhaustive list of spraying and spreading drone applications. There will be more use cases invented in the nearest future and you can be one of those pioneers leading the industry to new horizons. 

Now let's make some important conclusions.