He once thought that milk came from the supermarket.
Now a much more enlightened Pablo Yanez is using the experience gained from working in the New Zealand dairy farming industry to launch an agricultural drone business in North Otago.
Having experienced first hand the challenges of farming — from compliance and time management to labour shortages and unpredictable weather — he and his wife Francisca Contador had truly walked in the farmer’s shoes which equipped them to provide good service.
When the couple left their homeland of Chile in 2009, their knowledge of New Zealand was about akin to their knowledge of the dairy industry.
It was largely limited to the country being on the other side of the world.
Wanting to create a better future for their family and to settle somewhere they could improve their English, they had been exploring options for a country to move to.
After Mr Yanez googled New Zealand and discovered it was home to a plethora of adventure activities — and that it was possible to go snow boarding and surfing in the same day — he was sold.
“I thought, ‘s… that’s where I’m going’,” he recalled this week.
Fifteen years and two children later — Catalina and Tobias — he has ticked off all those activities and the couple are now launching their own adventure, Droplets Agri Drone Tech.
The rural sector was a far cry from the couple’s previous professional careers in Chile where Mr Yanez was a graphic designer and his wife a physiotherapist.
Newly married, they lived in a city of about 1 million people but the career opportunities were in the capital, Santiago, which was home to about 8 million residents.
They did not want to move there because it was very crowded, had air pollution, people with “bad habits” and it was impossible to find a parking spot, he said.
They knew the move to New Zealand would be permanent.
They have since returned three times and family members have also been regular visitors to New Zealand.
Not wanting to head to Auckland which they felt would be “more of the same”, the couple enrolled in English classes in Christchurch.
They alighted from a bus in Cathedral Square with their backpacks and thought “now what?”, he recalled.
He started working in a small graphic design studio but the money was not particularly good and he did not want to spend eight hours a day at a computer.
“I felt it was not really what I wanted, not another Chile.”
By coincidence, a couple heard them speaking Spanish and approached them, inviting them to their home on a dairy farm in Culverden, North Canterbury.
They were herd managers who lived in a nice house, had a dog and a car and, to the young couple, that was “pretty good”.
A few months later, they got a call from them saying their neighbour was looking for a farm worker and would Mr Yanez be interested in going for an interview.
At that time, the couple had $2000 in their bank account so Mr Yanez bought a car for $1500 and drove to the interview, securing the position.
He had never previously milked a cow or ridden a two-wheel motorbike.
“Actually, I thought milk came from the supermarket; all the food I needed comes from the supermarket.
“I knew there were cows and tractors [but] the supermarket was the food.
“That’s how townie we were.”
He did practical agriculture courses while his wife — who had been unable to get registration to work as a physiotherapist in New Zealand — did agribusiness courses.
It was after dairying that she realised she loved administration and was a “numbers person”.
She is now studying accounting support, along with teaching at the Waitaki Aquatic Centre twice a week.
Once they gained an understanding of the farming operation — the business, not just milking cows — they started setting goals to progress through the industry.
They started going to DairyNZ workshops — often there were only farm owners and managers and the like, “and us”, he said.
In 2014, they moved to North Otago for their first manager’s job.
They later shifted to a 520-cow farm in Papakaio where they did their first year as contract milkers and their second season on a hybrid contract.
They spent eight seasons on that property.
Eventually, Mr Yanez started to get bored.
He had a long-standing interest in flying remote-controlled helicopters and planes which then also translated to drones when they “became a thing”.
He bought a small drone and, while it was like a toy, he could see the potential application of drones in the agricultural sector, even for checking water troughs or stock.
On the farm, there was about 6ha of fodder beet on flat land and there were a few areas of the crop where it was growing willow weed.
A ground-based contractor sprayed the entire paddock but only a few patches needed spray.
So more chemical than necessary was needed and there was also the damage to the crop from the wheel marks.
Mr Yanez estimated about 10 days worth of feed was lost.
Watching YouTube, he saw a big drone in China being used to spray rice paddies — given rice grew in water, tractors could not be used — and he told his wife he needed “one of those”.
Embarking on some research, he found a company in Auckland running drone courses but then the Covid-19 pandemic intervened and his priorities changed.
Once it was over, he signed up for a two-day course in Queenstown and was “fully hooked” from that day.
Initially the plan was to continue dairy farming while also operating a drone, but flying the drone was mostly an early morning job which did not fit with the dairying calendar.
“I thought, we can go back to farming anytime we want to but I do really want to try this first.
“If it works, great. If it doesn’t … ,” he said.
“At least we tried,” his wife added.
They finished dairy farming at the end of the last season.
Their business is now fully licensed and operational, offering services such as mapping, spraying, spreading and crop health monitoring.
Their DJI Agras T40 agricultural drone is equipped with a coaxial-twin rotor design allowing it to carry a spray load of 40 litres and a spread load of 50kg.
The benefit of drones included the ability to work in difficult terrain, completing small jobs, immediate applications after rain or irrigation, applications on crops, large area applications per day, a reduction in the use of water resources, uniformity and time of application, and health and safety.
With the encouragement of Business South Waitaki navigator Rebecca Finlay, Droplets was selected for a startup food and fibre agritech challenge in Christchurch last year which involved an intensive eight-week programme.
Mr Yanez was also grateful for the ongoing support of local agrichemical applicator George Tepper and agronomist Matthew Paton.
When it came to farming, Mr Yanez saw technology as a “helping hand”.
He was drawing on his skills, including graphic design, in his new venture.
In Australia, there was an industry of drone operators and it was a few years advanced on New Zealand, he said.
In the future, the couple’s plans were big but it was one step at a time. At the moment, he was focused on keeping it simple and operating the drone himself.
He had already done about 100ha and 40 hours of flying time.
sally.rae@odt.co.nz
