The decision by the World Trade Organization pushes a 15-year corporate dispute over illegal support for plane giants to the centre of caustic world trade relations and comes on top of a tariff war between Washington and Beijing.

In response, the United States intends to impose new 10 per cent tariffs on aircraft and 25 per cent on other specified European agricultural and industrial goods starting as early as Oct. 18, an official from the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said. The official described the decision a “significant victory” for the United States.

The Trump administration’s list of 25 per cent retaliatory tariffs, released later Wednesday, includes French wine, Italian cheese and single-malt Scotch whisky. Italian wine was exempted from the list.

Other products on the U.S. tariff list include United Kingdom-made sweaters, pullovers, cashmere items and wool clothing, as well as olives from France, Germany and Spain, EU-produced pork sausage and other pork products other than ham, and German coffee. The new tariffs are to take effect as early as Oct. 18.

The aircraft tariffs would not apply to aircraft parts, sparing Airbus assembly operations in Alabama from higher costs, as well as shielding European parts used by U.S. plane maker Boeing.

WTO arbitrators said Boeing had lost the equivalent to $7.5 billion a year in sales and disruption to deliveries of some of its largest aircraft because of cheap European government loans to arch-rival Airbus (all figures US$).

The decision, confirming a figure reported by Reuters last week, allows Washington to target the same value of EU goods, but bars any retaliation against European financial services.

It is part of a two-way dispute that diplomats and trade experts expect to lead to tit-for-tat European import tariffs against U.S. goods next year over state subsidies for Boeing.

The Trump administration asked the WTO for an emergency meeting to give the formal ratification needed for tariffs in mid-October.

Goods from EU countries that are not part of the Airbus consortium, such as Italy, would still be targeted, a USTR official said, because European Union nations all bear responsibility for the situation.

Broad selling amid worries over slowing global growth that had punished European stocks earlier on Wednesday accelerated as the ruling revived worries about damage to the already-ailing regional economy. The pan European STOXX 600 index finished down 2.7 per cent, its worst day since December 2018.

Wall Street’s main indexes suffered their sharpest one-day declines in nearly six weeks on Wednesday after employment and manufacturing data suggested that the U.S.-China trade war is taking an increasing toll on the U.S. economy.

War of attrition

The world’s two largest planemakers have waged a war of attrition over subsidies at the WTO since 2004 in a dispute that has tested the trade policeman’s influence and is expected to set the tone for competition from would-be rivals from China.

The WTO had already found that both Europe’s Airbus and its U.S. rival Boeing received billions of dollars of illegal subsidies in the world’s largest corporate trade dispute.

The global trade body is due to decide early next year on the level of annual tariffs the EU can impose on U.S. imports.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the decision would weigh on the European planemaker, which is one of Germany’s largest industrial employers and is headquartered in France.

Before any tariffs can be imposed, the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body must formally adopt the arbiters’ report in a process expected to take between 10 days and four weeks.

Its next scheduled meeting is on Oct. 28, but Washington’s request could bring that forward to Oct. 14.

‘Lose-lose’ trade war

While the level of tariffs amounts to less than three days worth of trade between Europe and the United States, importers led by U.S. airlines that buy Airbus jets have urged Washington to be selective when choosing industries to hit in order to avoid causing collateral damage to the U.S. economy.

EU manufacturers are already facing U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum and a threat from U.S. President Donald Trump to penalize EU cars and car parts. The EU has in turn retaliated.

The Trump administration believes tariffs were effective in bringing China to the negotiating table over trade, and in convincing Japan to open its agricultural market to U.S. products.

Airbus has said this would lead to a “lose-lose” trade war and has published a video stressing its contribution to the U.S. industry through local assembly plants and 4,000 direct jobs.

Not all analysts see the WTO’s aircraft subsidy row — with its thousands of pages of legal and aeronautical jargon — inflaming broader international trade tensions.

“In some ways it is a distinct issue from the rest of the Trump trade wars,” said Constantine Fraser of UK research firm TS Lombard.

“I think the White House is going to be aggressive in pursuing this, but I don’t think there is necessarily any kind of read-through from this to the prospect of tariffs on cars.”

— Reporting by Tim Hepher in London, Philip Blenkinsop in Brussels and David Shepardson in Washington; additional reporting by Stephanie Nebahay in Geneva, Josephine Mason and Danilo Masoni in London, Andreas Rinke in Berlin and Andrea Shalal, Heather Timmons and David Lawder in Washington; writing by Tim Hepher and Philip Blenkinsop.

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It happens, says Matthew Johnson, owner of M3 Aerial Productions, a Winnipeg company that offers UAV training and aerial imagery and mapping services.

He calls it “flyaway,” which is when a UAV, or drone, loses track of its home point, and the operator can no longer control it.

“Most people who have flyaways have them because they don’t understand how to use their drone properly, they’ve not read the manual and followed the guidelines about safe operation,” Johnson says.

Not only is it money down the drain, it’s also a potential safety hazard.

Transport Canada recently introduced new regulations around both recreational and commercial use of UAVs.

Anyone flying drones recreationally must follow new safety rules that include not flying at night, in clouds, or higher than 90 metres above ground, and maintaining a distance of 75 metres from buildings, vehicles, vessels, animals, and people.

You also can’t fly within nine kilometres of “aerodromes,” which include small local airstrips.

Most commercial operators will need to obtain a Special Flight Operations Certificate (SFOC), which is also required for all UAVs over 35 kilograms in weight, whether they are being flown recreationally or commercially.

For UAVs under 35 kilograms, there are two exemptions for which commercial operators can apply to conduct lower-risk UAV operation in remote areas without an SFOC. To qualify, operators must demonstrate to Transport Canada that they understand and can meet the updated, weight-based safety criteria.

Farmers need an SFOC

“There are a lot of requirements in order to meet the stipulations of the exemption, and if you can’t then you have to get an SFOC,” says Johnson.

“Where farmers are concerned, if they’re using a drone on their operation, even just for themselves to take pictures of their crops, that’s still a commercial endeavour and so they’re not subject to the recreational legislation, they’re subject to the commercial, which requires that they have training from a certified training school, and obtain an SFOC.”

Johnson started offering UAV operators courses in November 2016 and had already trained 42 people by the end of March. Most are from the agricultural industry such as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada employees, researchers, students, agronomists and some farmers.

Lesson one is knowing your drone and its limitations.

“For example, people don’t realize that when they are operating their drone in the winter, depending on which drone it is, some of them are not meant to be flown in less than 0 C and others in less than -10 C,” Johnson says.

A good place to start is to always read the instruction manual, a step people often skip, sometimes to their regret.

“A friend of mine was given a Phantom 3 Professional drone for Christmas and he took it into his back yard, and it was -30 C outside, and put the battery in, turned it on, and it flew away and he lost it. He flew it for one-and-a-half seconds,” says Johnson.

“When I’ve talked to all these people who have had flyaways, the one thing that I’ve noticed that’s very consistent is that they haven’t been calibrating their drones. They’ve done it maybe once or twice but you need to do it every time you fly.”

Structures and metal buildings can affect the signal to UAVs, as can different locations, Johnson says.

“Different areas of the Earth have different magnetic fields that can cause the drone’s guidance chips to become affected, so you need to recalibrate your drone every time you move to a different location too.”

The course also covers operational factors, including how environmental conditions such as heat, cold, dust, wind and precipitation can affect the drone.

“If it’s too hot, the batteries can overheat and you end up getting other problems that are associated with that. If it’s too cold, the chemical reactions inside the batteries prevent them from functioning reliably, so you can have unpredictable battery power,” says Johnson.

Complicated application

Johnson also helps simplify the process of applying for an SFOC. “When I filled out my SFOC application for the first time it took me over 40 hours.”

Participants in the initial operator’s course do not actually fly UAVs because they need to complete the training before they are able to do that, but they can take a followup, hands-on UAV training course that gets them outside and flying, and also runs through how to collect and process the data they collect.

“It’s mostly consulting agronomists and researchers that are investing in the higher-end UAV technology,” Johnson says. “But farmers are able to do it on their own if they really want to. It’s not all that complicated to apply on their farm. At a base level, they can use it without advanced sensors just to get an aerial perspective of their field, and that changes their whole understanding of how the field is growing.”

High-end UAVs, such as those used by researchers and consultants, can cost up to $30,000, but Johnson says farmers don’t need to invest that much to get a lot more data. For around $2,000 to $3,000 they can purchase a good-quality UAV such as the Phantom 3 or Phantom 4 Professional multi-rotor UAV manufactured by DJI and add additional sensors that give more detail for a total of $7,000 to $8,000.

New sensor

A new sensor, made by Minneapolis-based Sentera, is making it easier for farmers to collect and analyze their own imagery and mapping data.

“In my opinion, the Sentera sensor is one of best available for farmers at this point right now. It’s small enough that it can fit on the DJI Phantom series drones, which are the most common drone in the world,” says Johnson.

“The Sentera sensor allows farmers to fly their drone normally as they would to collect any kind of video or photo imagery they want, but it also allows them to collect near-infrared, NDVI (normalized difference vegetative index) imagery at the same time.”

Sentera includes software called Ag Vault that provides the NDVI data to the farmer immediately at the field.

“You land the drone, plug it into a laptop and it does a basic processing of the data, so you can have it right away,” says Johnson. “That’s one of the major benefits of this sensor. In the past the process was a lot more complicated and took several hours to fly the fields, upload everything back at the office, process and distribute the data. This way, anyone can have the data at field-side.”

Johnson says that although UAV technology is constantly evolving, this year’s equipment won’t be obsolete by next year, so it’s a sound investment.

“There will likely be other equipment come along that is better but the equipment from this year is still going to be providing that excellent quality of data that’s available now for the next five to eight years, depending on how much use the drone sees.”

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Transport Minister Marc Garneau on Thursday announced an interim order with new rules for the recreational operation of model aircraft and of drones weighing more than 250 grams and up to 35 kg.

Recreational drones are now banned from flying higher than 90 metres; from flying within 75 metres of “buildings, structures, vehicles, vessels, animals and the public” which includes “spectators, bystanders or any person not associated with the operation of the aircraft” and over any “open-air assembly of persons.”

The new rules also ban drones from flying within nine km of the centre of any airport, heliport or any other site where aircraft take off and land; within nine km of a forest fire area; and within the perimeter of an emergency operation site involving police or first responders.

Recreational drones also may not be flown at night or “in cloud,” the government said.

Recreational drone operators are also now required to mark their drones with their contact information.

Noting Thursday the number of incidents involving recreational drones has “more than tripled” since 2014, Garneau said the new measures, which take effect immediately, will “enhance the safety of aviation and the public while we work to bring into force permanent regulations.”

The temporary rules, which are expected to be in place for up to a year, impose fines for non-compliance, worth up to $3,000 per individual.

The new measures won’t affect operators of drones for “commercial, academic or research purposes,” the government said Thursday.

In those cases, “the rules that are already in place are effective and most commercial users operate their drones in a safe manner.”

Work purposes

Drone use for “work or research purposes” includes the unmanned aircraft’s use in farm work, a Transport Canada spokesperson said Thursday via email.

Thus, farmers or anyone else using a drone for work still must either get a special flight operations certificate (SFOC) from Transport Canada, “unless they meet the strict safety conditions in Transport Canada’s exemptions,” the department said.

SFOCs lay out specific terms for a given operator, which can include limits on maximum allowed altitude, mandatory communications with air traffic control, and minimum required distances from people, buildings and aerodromes.

Exemptions allow work use of drones with a maximum takeoff weight of at least one kg up to 25 kg, with maximum calibrated airspeed of 87 knots or less, as long as the drone is being operated away from “built-up areas, airspace, controlled aerodromes, forest fire areas and other restricted locations.”

Work-related drone use that’s exempt from an SFOC also requires operators to report any drone-related injuries requiring medical attention, as well as any “unintended contact” between a drone and people, livestock, vehicles, vessels or other structures.

Work-related drone uses which fall outside the conditions of those exemptions are subject to requirements for an SFOC, regardless of the drone’s weight.

Transport Canada noted Thursday it’s also proposing changes to federal aviation regulations including new flight rules, aircraft marking and registration requirements, knowledge testing, minimum age limits, and pilot permits for “certain UAV operators.”

Those new rules — which are expected to be published in June for public comment — focus on “smaller” (25 kg or less) drones and unmanned aircraft operated within visual line of sight, whether recreational or non-recreational. — AGCanada.com Network

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“They apply spray under conditions that a ground rig can’t — for example, with soil moisture. They cover much more area than a ground rig ever can so they can be more timely.

”Jill Lane, executive director of the Canadian Aerial Applicators Association (CAAA), agrees, writing by email that more and more Prairie acres are being sprayed from the air.

If you’re considering aerial fungicide application this season, make sure to ask about timing and water volume.

Timing: Whether you’re spraying from the ground or from the air, timing is the most critical issue. “Even just a day or two on either side of an ideal timing can make a big difference in terms of effectiveness,” says Wolf.

Lane concurs. Farmers and agronomists should make sure aerial applicators can provide the service within the application window.

Water volume: Water volume is also key. Wolf recommends asking these questions: “What water volume are you applying? What are you doing to control drift? What does the label say for water volume? How do you reconcile those things? What would it cost to do more water?”

Some fixed-wing aircraft are high capacity, capable of ferrying 800 U.S. gallons, Wolf says. But new atomizer technologies allow some applicators to push water volumes lower. Wolf has had calls from people wondering how aerial applicators can pull it off.

“They’re doing it because they’re using a much finer spray. They have a tremendous drift risk as a result of that. They are certainly cautious about when they spray. But there’s no magic here.”

Applying a finer spay than the label allows is illegal, Wolf says, because of the drift risk. “That is something that we all have to respect because our business is at stake here,” says Wolf.

Lane says the CAAA only supports applications that follow labels.

Like other ag businesses, the aerial application industry is facing growing regulations and public pressure. Lane recommends farmers and agrologists look for aerial applicators who hold all provincial and federal licences.

Helicopter application still a niche

Helicopters seem to have an edge over fixed wing aircraft in some situations. They can turn more quickly and handle fields with more obstacles. They also come with their own landing pad, usually on the back of the tender truck.

But the CAAA hasn’t seen a big increase in helicopter use in either agriculture or forestry, says Lane.

Some fixed-wing operators have added a helicopter to their fleet, she says. The few helicopter companies expanding into aerial application could be driven by slower times in their own market, such as oil, she adds.

Wolf says helicopter applicators are more common in the U.S. In Western Canada, fields tend to be large and uniform, making them suitable for fixed wing aircraft. But helicopters do compete remarkably well in some areas, he adds.

Wolf sees opportunities with helicopters to have a low-drift spray because other industries where helicopters are used have always had low-drift requirements. “They actually have a number of atomizers at their disposal that drift less than fixed-wing aircraft.”

If a helicopter uses the same CP nozzles used by fixed-wing aircraft, the helicopter’s slower speed should add up to a coarser spray. “The faster they fly, typically the finer the spray becomes.”

Wolf hasn’t done any work on calibration of helicopters yet. But he has worked with fixed-wing aircraft. Asked whether fixed-wing aircraft push spray into the canopy, he said based on his own first-hand experience, they don’t. “It’s a bit of a myth.”

Wolf hasn’t seen first-hand whether rotary aircraft will force the spray into the crop canopy. But he’s sceptical of such claims for several reasons:

• The helicopter only produces enough downdraft to stay aloft, so the lighter the aircraft, the less downdraft.
• Forward speed disperses the downdraft force over distance. “So the actual amount of downdraft per square metre is quite low because you’re moving forward so quickly.”
• Flying height also comes into play. To avoid wingtip vortices, pilots typically fly higher than they once did.
• The wind travelling down from the wing arrives at the canopy before any droplets.

Wolf hasn’t entirely ruled out downdraft playing a role with rotary aircraft.

“But I wouldn’t get one because of it,” he says.

And he wouldn’t use it as a reason to cut water volumes, either.

For more information on the Canadian Aerial Applicators Association, plus an online member directory, visit canadianaerialapplicators.com.

This article first appeared in the June 7, 2016 issue of Grainews

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Drones are becoming a big piece of the precision ag puzzle, and Dr. Kevin Price of Des Moines, Iowa, says they will completely change how we scout.

“What this technology does is help build a map to look for problem areas in the field,” Price explains. “The scout gets the co-ordinates and walks out into the field to get a first-hand look at what’s going on.”

Drones will also add huge new efficiencies, says agronomist Greg Adelman of Southey, Sask. “While a person out walking the field with a metre stick or GPS can assess 160 acres in an hour, I’m assuming the periday peak efficiency would be something like 6,000 acres with a fixed wing UAV.”

Adelman is a Canadian affiliate of Price’s company RoboFlight, a scouting data management company that takes images from UAVs and stitches them together into a composite image called an orthomosaic. Information gleaned from these images will help farmers make snap decisions about managing their crops, while the precision lends them tremendous potential to reduce costly inputs.

This really goes back to the dawn of the aircraft age at the beginning of the First World War. Initially, the primitive biplanes were used for reconnaissance, with camera crews dispatched to monitor enemy lines from the air. They took thousand of pictures and watched for troop movements, changes in the lines or massing of equipment. Command officers used this information to plan both their offence and defence according to the incoming data.

Farmers are no strangers to this idea either. Some have used aerial photography and satellite imagery to monitor their crops, although getting this data has often been expensive and inconvenient.

Now, what these drones offer is an inexpensive alternative that can fly at the farmer’s need. With the advent of the Global Positioning System, navigation software and smaller, high-resolution digital cameras, the stage is set to incorporate drones into farming.

“Companies build implements designed to do precision applications of chemicals and seeds and, as you’re driving through the field, the tractor is adjusting the rate of fertilizer or herbicide based on geographic co-ordinates that are fed into the sprayers by an on-board computer,” Price says. “If you have a map that tells the tractor where it is and what’s there, then the software can decide whether to turn on the sprayers or not.”

This kind of precision depends on highly detailed mapping, which is what the drones do. The first drones in agriculture were model airplanes with a camera mounted in a jury-rigged box on the wing. The plane flew along a programmed flight path transmitted from a computer to an on-board GPS sensor. The data directed the plane through a series of points and instructed the camera to snap images along the way.

Today’s navigation system is still the same, but the cameras have greater resolution and the current aircraft are a lot more suitable to the task. RoboFlight, for instance, uses the electric-powered RF70 airframe.

“This aircraft is amazing,” Price says. “It’s got multiple bays for mapping units and it will cruise for 45 minutes to an hour and 20 minutes depending on the load. It’s made of high-density EPP so it’s not like beer cooler foam. We’ve taken that plane and crashed it from 200 feet in the air, picked it up and put it back in the air again. It’s highly durable. We’ve flown it in 50-mile-an-hour winds and we’ve had it up to 100 miles an hour with a tailwind and it was still flying stable.”

So that’s what the airplane does. The next part of the package is the camera equipment that it carries in any of the payload bays. This is the farmer’s eye in the sky and can see things we’ve never seen before. In digital imagery, the picture you see is actually made up of thousands of points called pixels. The quality of the image (i.e. the resolution) is a direct result of how small an area of ground is represented in one pixel. In a satellite image each pixel represents about one square metre on the ground at best.

“Now we’re talking two centimetres,” Price says. “We’re looking at individual plant leaves and we’re able to assess the pigmentation of the plants. I can tell you the geometry of the leaves in three-dimensional space to see which way they’re oriented.”

Not only is the resolution much finer but we’re now able to see different wavelengths of light too. This gives us even more useful information as to what’s going on in that field.

Price recalls one farm client who had Canada thistle in a field, and who spent $4,000 to spray the entire 120 acres to knock the weed out.

“Well, once we got through flying the field a day or two after he sprayed, we could still see Canada thistle,” Price says. We found that he had only needed to spray 0.6 acre but he had sprayed 120. We were able to map the location of all the plants and flying the field and processing of the data cost $506. He could have easily gone in and spot sprayed and saved himself a tremendous amount of money.”

The first UAV cameras were digital units that you could get from any camera store. They were small, they required no film magazine and no motor drive so they were extremely light compared to the old film cameras. Additionally, because the images were digital, they were easily uploaded to a computer, where several images could be stitched together into a composite.

Now we’re sending specialized colour infrared cameras up there to give us eyes that can filter out certain wavelengths and see the world in terms of visible and infrared radiation.

“By putting the two of them together, you compute an index called the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index or NDVI that’s highly sensitive to chlorophyll concentration,” Price says. “Anything that affects the plant, anything that changes the concentration of chlorophyll on the ground, the NDVI will pick it up.”

The NDVI is much more sensitive than our own eyes in detecting some of the subtle differences in the way light is reflected back to it from the canopy. Changes in the plant’s pigmentation are sometimes the result of stress on the plant, such as nitrogen or water deficiency, disease or insects. The resulting images, Price says, can help farmers make much better management decisions.

“It can measure your biomass, it can measure the photosynthesis and it can measure the stress level of the plant,” adds Adelman. “You can actually see where the plant is stressed up to two weeks before you see symptoms. I’ve seen RoboFlight data where they could see nitrogen deficiency two weeks before symptoms showed up, so if you can see it that quickly you can address the problem before it’s showing symptoms and reduce yield loss in that field.”

The third part of the system is the computer power to take the data and quickly put it together into a ready-to-read package.

“That’s what our company is really all about,” Price says. “What we’re doing right now is working with the portals for allowing people to get the data to us in a very efficient manner. Basically you pull the SV card out of the camera, plug it into your computer and your computer will automatically download it to our shop. We process it and have it back to you.”

As the technology matures the data will get better and better and the computer capabilities will improve in step. What this means is that farmers and agronomists will become even better tuned to the behaviour of land on a section-by-section basis. If we can see plants are under stress, in time we hope to develop the algorithms that will tell us why the plants are stressed. We’ll be able to see different types of weeds, different insect pests at work as well as be able to identify specific diseases before they become a major problem. Precision agriculture will become more and more precise.

“This new UAV technology will be like auto  steer,” concludes Saskatchewan farmer Brad Hanmer. “Within five years it was mainstream and I think this is the next step for RTK technology. We can make even more management decisions based on science and less on intuition.”

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