Reusel – Potato farm Van Den Borne gets more opportunities to fly over their own land with drones. This special permit goes into effect coming Friday.

This Friday, the municipality of Reusel will officially have an airport. But you will not come across arrival and departure halls with busy check-in counters and baggage belts. It is an ‘Agri Drone Port’, linked to the Practice Center for Precision Farming of Jacob van den Borne.

Van den Borne has been using drones for many years to digitize the plots and crops on his potato farm. Based on this data, he quickly knows what the plants and the soil need. He is leading the way in the Netherlands. With the support of Europe, the state and the province, the practice center was opened two years ago; a place for training, experiments and demonstrations.

With that, a next step was taken. Van den Borne ran into the limits of what was possible with flying drones in terms of permits. “If you want to innovate further, you have to be able to test well”, says Van den Borne. “In the Netherlands there are restrictions. We thought: what could be better than a private controlled airspace where you can go ahead. Safe and responsible of course.”

The wish was clear, the solution complex. When it comes to drones, the laws and regulations in the Netherlands are constantly lagging behind. There are so-called ‘Drone Ports’. “But they are all at existing or old airports,” says Paul van Zoggel, coordinator of the practice center.

Not for the first time did Van den Borne think ‘out of the box’. Would it be possible to make use of the airport scheme, so that from now on ‘Reusel’ will become an official airport and other airports will take into account with you? It took some crumb – the whole process took more than a year – but from now on the permit is definitive: Van den Borne or another official drone pilot may fly electric drones weighing up to 150 kilos at the Reusel company and up to a height of 300 meters. It is the first Drone Port above agricultural land in the Netherlands.

Source: ED