The ag industry eyes drones as tools, if they can figure them out.

When Abel Valdez first flew a drone over a Salinas Valley lettuce field last year, it bewildered some of his colleagues.

“The tractor driver was looking at me like I’m crazy because I’m out there flying this little robot around,” says Valdez, IT projects manager at Tanimura & Antle. “At the same time, the tractor has GPS. Drones are an extension of what we already do in the fields.”

Unmanned aircrafts, known more popularly as drones, have been buzzing from the battlefield into civilian life for all kinds of purposes, from photography and filmmaking to Amazon.com’s futuristic plans for delivery by drone. Millions of acres of farmland present a potentially lucrative space for drones as well, if growers and software developers can figure out a cost-effective way to use them, and a way to use the data.

At T&A, Valdez sees a couple of ways the technology might be deployed. “Imagine being able to cruise the whole field and see what the drone sees, instead of having to walk it to see if a spot is discolored or doesn’t look right,” he says.

His other hope: scaring off birds with raptor lookalikes or noise-making drones.

There are all sorts of constraints, including battery life, the sheer amount of data drones collect and high Salinas Valley winds. “I may have a broken drone or two in my office,” Valdez says.

Meanwhile, a T&A alum, Steve Bassi Jr., is at work on developing software that would collect images of a lettuce field and provide a rough estimate of any problem areas that are too dry, or where heads are off in size.

Bassi, who splits his time between San Jose and Tokyo, got his start in high school as an intern at T&A, where his dad works. In 2010, he launched a cybersecurity company, and this year, launched Definitive Drone Data, aimed at finding ways to process the immense amount of data drones can collect.

He sees an immense market share in specialty crops, like lettuce and broccoli that the Salinas Valley is famous for. But when it comes to agriculture, drones so far have been mostly applied to vast swaths of leading Midwestern crops like corn and soybeans.

The goal, Bassi says, isn’t to replace human intelligence or farmers’ intuition, but rather to bolster them with data. “There’s the saying that the best fertilizer is the farmer’s shadow,” he says. “How do we efficiently augment the farmer’s shadow without blocking out too much light?”