SYRACUSE — The 10,800-square-foot warehouse building located on about 0.6 acres at 117 Game Road in Syracuse, was recently sold. 

Christopher Community, Inc. purchased the property from Syracuse Mosiac Terrazzo Corp. for $450,000. Gary Cottet of Cushman & Wakefield/Pyramid Brokerage Company represented the buyer in this transaction.

The property was assessed at $590,000 for 2018, according to Onondaga County online property records. It was last sold for $100,000 in 2006.

Christopher Community says it is a nonprofit development and management company specializing in housing for seniors, families, and the disabled in upstate New York.

UTICA — A Utica–based investigative firm has formally rebranded as Sotera Investigative Group, LLC following its split from Canada–based Investigative Solutions Network (ISN) and is eyeing steady growth in the future.

Sotera initially opened an office in Utica in March 2017 as ISN, but rebranded in March 2018 after one of the then-owners of ISN bought out a portion of the business to form Sotera Investigative Group, says Francis Manfredo, president of Sotera. The local office and staff remained from ISN when the rebrand took effect. He declined to name Sotera’s owner.

“I think the best way to say it is that at Sotera, nothing changed. Nothing changed except for the ownership and rebranding of the company,” Manfredo tells CNYBJ.

Sotera Investigative Group offers several types of investigative services, including civil, corporate, and criminal, according to its LinkedIn page. Investigators include former law-enforcement officers and certified fire investigators. Clients include lawyers, corporations, and individuals.

The investigations the company handles vary between covert operations and hands-on work, such as fire-scene analysis for insurance companies. In addition to investigations, Sotera also offers different types of training, including sexual harassment and workplace-environment issues, as well as active-shooter situations.

Fire-scene analysis investigations can last weeks to several months, depending on the size of the scene, and cost on average about $150 per hour, Manfredo says. He adds that other types of cases, such as sexual-harassment investigations, usually take a few weeks, and cost about $110 per hour. Sotera handled slightly more than 130 cases from May 2017 to May 2018. 

Currently based in a 2,700-square-foot office space under a five-year lease at 6 Rhoads Drive in the Utica Business Park, Sotera employs 24 people (20 investigators and four-person executive team). It handles cases throughout New York state. Each investigator can have one or more cases at a time, with occasional time between them. 

The company’s executive team is made up of Manfredo; Jeffrey Morgan, director of investigations; Robert Stephens, director of fire investigations; and Tina Pavlot, finance administrator. 

“We have a solid team in place. We have outstanding investigators, they have decades of experience,” Manfredo says. “I think we’re in a really good position to serve our clients with their varying needs.”

Manfredo says the goal of the company is to continue to grow — slowly and steadily. He adds that he hopes to expand first within New York state and then eventually expand to adjoining states, ultimately hiring more employees and moving into a larger office space. He declined to provide the firm’s revenue figures.

Manfredo says he will partner with other companies to maximize efficiency. For example, he says that if he has a client who needs security work, he will ask LB Security and Investigations Inc., also based in Utica, to assist in providing guard service. 

“I’d like to say that we’re unique in the fact that we do all sorts of investigations…We do many types of investigations, we do training,” Manfredo says. “We work very well with human resource departments and corporations and companies on a variety of issues.”

Sotera was slated to hold a formal rebranding ceremony with the Greater Utica Chamber of Commerce on June 18 at 4:30 p.m at its office in the Utica Business Park.

SYRACUSE — As a business, distributing pollen is nothing to sneeze at. 

Each year, farmers pay hundreds of millions of dollars to beekeepers to have their crops fertilized by honey bees. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farmers spent nearly $700 million for the services in 2012.

Adam Fine, co-founder and chief technology officer at Dropcopter, is working to give farmers, and bees, some high-tech backup.

Headquartered at the Genius Center in the Tech Garden in downtown Syracuse, Dropcopter is building unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) that can deliver pollen to apple, almond, and cherry trees — for starters.

The idea was promising enough that Dropcopter was a finalist team in round two of the year-long GENIUS NY program. The firm was awarded $250,000 in financing from the Empire State Development-funded program that is focused on UAS. In return, Dropcopter gives up 4 percent interest in the company.

The quarter-million dollars has allowed the business to push forward with development, testing and even manufacturing, Fine tells CNYBJ.

The award also brought Fine, a San Franciscan, to Syracuse. At his space in the Tech Garden, he carefully explains that Dropcopter is not interested in making unmanned aircraft systems, or drones. “We don’t want to be an aircraft company,” he says. 

Instead the company is focused on the hardware and software that will allow a drone to precisely deliver pollen to plants so that crop yields can be improved.

The business has two functional pollinators at this point and has used them to test the process. The first tests were with almonds in California the home of Dropcopter’s other co-founder and CEO, Matt Koball. “I live in the heart of almond country,” Koball says.

The pollinators have also been tried at cherry farms in California and on June 6, Fine went to Beak & Skiff Apple Orchard in LaFayette to showcase the company’s work. A drone flew over about 5 acres of trees, dropping precisely measured units of pollen.

The results will be closely monitored at Beak & Skiff, and compared to trees that were pollinated by bees and other natural means alone, Fine says.

At other test sites, some trees were covered during pollination season — roughly two weeks in spring — so that the only pollen they would have received would be from the Dropcopter. Other trees were left to be pollinated naturally and, as at Beak & Skiff, some were pollinated naturally and by Dropcopter.

A professional third-party testing company will compare the results. Preliminarily, Fine says that almond trees pollinated by Dropcopter in 2015 and 2016 saw a 10 percent improvement in the number of flowers that create nuts — what is called a “nut set,” by those in the field. That study, he points out, was conducted by the company itself, not an outside tester.

Pollination isn’t the only possible application for drones in agriculture, according to Fine. Increasing human population is expected to put more pressure on food production, he says. That can push innovation.

“I think we’re at the tip of the spear,” he says. He adds that drones might be effective in dropping pesticides, flying close to trees to avoid treating anything other than the targeted crops.

The pollen-distributing parts of the drones Dropcopter is currently using are custom models with some parts sourced from vacuum cleaners, power drills, and even salsa bottles, Fine says. The company has used a share of its GENIUS NY grant to build ready-for-market machines. They are being built by Chenango Valley Technology of Sherburne, Fine says. He notes that the cost of having the work done in Central New York is half or maybe a third of what it would have cost back in San Francisco.

Those savings are just one benefit Fine cites of bringing the operation to Central New York. For one thing, he says, there are plenty of “very qualified” drone pilots here, able to test the machines.

In addition, the Tech Garden’s ecosystem is a great help, he says. Tax experts, programmers, and legal advisers are readily available.

In fact, he says he has found right at the Tech Garden a company that can write the programming he thinks could help automate much of the pollination process. Instead of having to guide the drone row by row, a farmer could simply input what trees need to be pollinated, or treated, and the software would direct the drone where to fly and when to start and stop distributing the payload.

That’s not legal right now, he explains. Under current laws, drones have to be under someone’s control at all times and in most places have to be within the operator’s eyesight. But he can see a day when those rules are updated and Dropcopter can present customers with “a drone-in-a-box solution” that will help farmers improve productivity.

Farmers are not fast to change, he says, so before that happens he expects Dropcopter to have clear proof that it can deliver. “They want to see results,” Fine says of farmers.

Even then, he adds, he doesn’t expect the whir of drones to replace the buzz of honey bees around the world’s crop lands. Not all crops are suitable for the process, and even for those that are, Fine says bees don’t need to worry about losing their jobs. “We’re selling this as support,” he says, “a supplement for if there’s an emergency or other need.”