Reichenberger's Favorite Story of 2024

Cross-Country Move Pays Off in Aerial Drone Story

Joel Reichenberger
By  Joel Reichenberger , Progressive Farmer Senior Editor
A Hylio AR-130 drone from Apple Farm Services in Covington, Ohio, sprays water as it flies through a field during a demonstration. (DTN photo by Joel Reichenberger)

Editor's Note:

As the year came to a close, we once again asked the DTN/Progressive Farmer reporting team to pick out the most significant, most fun or otherwise their favorite story of 2024. They included solar events, wildfire recovery, political/policy coverage and profiles of American farmers and ranchers who shared their marketing, production and even life choices with our writers. We hope you have enjoyed our writers' favorites, continuing the series with today's story by DTN Progressive Farmer Senior Editor Joel Reichenberger.

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CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, Pa. (DTN) -- For me and my family, 2024 will be remembered almost solely as "the year of the move."

I settled in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in February 2008, as a young, single journalist covering sports for the local newspaper. I left in June 2024, married and a father to two children, and covering agriculture for DTN/Progressive Farmer.

It was my wife's career that really spurred the move. She works in higher education admissions and was offered a great opportunity at the University of Pittsburgh, a part of the country that wasn't on the radar for either of us, but one that we both decided could work. But I assumed all along that a move like that could only benefit my career; it didn't take long to realize once we had set down in Western Pennsylvania.

One of the first big stories I was working on after arriving here concerned recent advancements in aerial drone spraying.

I've written about the topic through the years and been witness to that niche industry's rise. For instance, I stopped by one of the early offices of Rantizo, now one of the leading names in aerial drone spraying, when the company was so new, engineers had to crawl out a window onto a roof to launch their machinery into the air.

Even though I hadn't thought I'd fallen behind, I was thrilled to dive into the topic again and discover that what had long been promised as "soon," or "next year," or "out in California first" or "maybe in five years" has become real for many farmers and companies across agriculture. Drones are no longer a novelty or a futuristic vision. They've morphed into a real-world, every season tool for many producers.

That's a fun story to write on my end.

Still, we were getting a little closer to the deadline for that story than I cared to admit, and I was still missing a few key interviews to really package it all together, not to mention the photography I'd need to really make it pop and be worthy of the cover-story status it was scheduled to have for Progressive Farmer magazine.

There are a lot of great things about living at 7,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies, even for an ag reporter. There are innovative ranchers up there and the photos, well, the photos are basically foolproof with cattle, cowhands and the mountains. But photographing cattle is always only part of what we do at DTN/Progressive Farmer, and it always made it tough when I had to drive a minimum of four hours and often more like seven or eight hours to get to where you'd regularly see a combine running. And there certainly weren't a lot of aerial-drone spraying entrepreneurs around.

Reporting that story in person from a northwestern Colorado address would have been a lot more difficult than reporting it from Western Pennsylvania, and I figured as much out within minutes of my search for a subject. My first call was to a drone operator who claimed to work across the Keystone State. Much to my delight, he planned to spray 5 miles from my house the very next day.

Later, looking for another source, I found a great operation only several hours down the road in eastern Ohio. I slept in my own bed after that assignment.

It feels like a silly thing to be happy about -- breaking news: farming reporter happy to live near farms -- but it was a nice consequence of the move. I expected the move to make things easier but was thrilled with just how true that proved to be.

I came away happy with the story, too, a dive into a rapidly growing area of agriculture technology that's gone from "the future" to "the present" in the blink of an eye.

Read the original story:

-- "Drones Are a Necessity for Some Farmers," https://www.dtnpf.com/…

Listen to the podcast:

-- Podcast: E213: Ag Drones, From Interesting to Essential, https://www.dtnpf.com/…

Joel Reichenberger can be reached at Joel.Reichenberger@dtn.com

Follow him on social platform X @JreichePF

Joel Reichenberger