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.”         

SYRACUSE — Holding a green marker, Nasir Ali makes two strokes to explain how the world works today.

One stroke starts near the left bottom of the white board and rises toward the center. The second starts where the first stopped and curves down toward the bottom right.

It is a pyramid and at the top are the giants of today’s economy, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. At the bottom are thousands and thousands of small startups that hope to be “the next Amazon.”

In between are companies that navigated the obstacles faced by startups. Their annual revenues reach $5 million to $10 million for a broad swath of companies, nearer the bottom than the top.

Moving up are companies that have sales 10 times greater, the pyramid is narrowing.

Above are the businesses that are doing $1 billion in annual sales and the pyramid is very, very narrow.

Ali, co-founder and CEO of Upstate Venture Connect (UVC), says that as companies climb the pyramid they help create workers and managers able to lead in today’s economy. The pyramid narrows as it rises, reflecting that companies disappear, either because they’ve been purchased by someone bigger, or they fail.

But even if companies fail, Ali says, the people within the firms still have the knowledge and skills they built up.

And if a company is sold, then the founders and others granted some ownership, are in a position to spur further growth. That healthy ecosystem gives other entrepreneurs access to capital and to advisers who can help them move beyond the startup phase.

Central New York isn’t there yet, he says, but it is moving in that direction. He points to fast-growing companies such as TCGPlayer.com, Terakeet, SpinCar, and Plowz & Mowz in Syracuse as well AIS in Rome, and Cheri Bundi in Geneva as key prospects for leading the region forward economically. 

The goal is no longer to build a company that lasts decades, with factories and skyscrapers, he explains. Instead, fast-growing businesses build capabilities and gain value from the people within — largely college-educated workers.

When the company is bought or fails, what goes away may be the name, but what remains are the skilled workers. “You don’t buy the letterhead,” Ali says. “It’s the people.”

Those workers go forward or split off and add their skills to other companies, other companies that can grow quickly and create more jobs. “People that are working on the staff are totally capable of coming up with the next great thing,” Ali says.

What about those workers who don’t have the skills, education, aptitude, or the resilience to be part of a fast-changing, high-growth company?

There is good news for them, Ali says. High-performing, high-tech companies help drive economies by creating not just high-growth jobs, but what he calls “secondary jobs.” Think of those who work at companies that provide services to high-growth companies — delivery people, for instance. Ali says studies have shown high-growth companies create five secondary jobs for every direct hire while traditional manufacturing businesses only create two secondary jobs per direct hire.

Since 2010, Upstate Venture Connect has been seeking to connect entrepreneurs with resources to build high-growth companies. “We believe the isolation of Upstate communities from each other is a major barrier for startup founders seeking access to advice, talent, connections and early stage investment,” the organization says on its website.

That helps explain why upstate New York, with a population roughly equal to New York City’s, sees only a small fraction of the venture capital. Ali says New York City attracts about $1 billion to $2 billion in venture-capital investment every quarter. All of Upstate, he says, sees less than $50 million during the same period. “We’re basically a decimal point.”

Venture capital is a vital ingredient to high-growth companies, Ali notes. So are entrepreneurs who invest in and advise others. “They engage with other entrepreneurs as they are on the rise,” he says. “They instill a sense of paying it forward.”

Ali adds that while Upstate isn’t there yet, “the trajectory is definitely up.”

A recent survey conducted by UVC found that more than 100 business in the region were building scalable companies, that is, operations that can serve customers nationally or globally. 

Survey respondents reported that scalable companies planned to triple their workforces in the next five years, and that most of the jobs they expected to fill would require a college education. 

The survey also showed that scalable companies pay much better than those limited to local markets. “Average pay for scalable firms was $66,000 per full time employee (compared to $38,000 for firms with a local customer base),” according to a UVC news release earlier this year.

The prosperity that a successful entrepreneurial economy can create isn’t limited to dollars, Ali adds. Successful entrepreneurs not only invest in other growing businesses, they can help fund museums and symphonies and other social goods, Ali says. They also bring their experience to not-for-profits, creating “social good.”

“Entrepreneurs,” he says, “are our most precious resources.”         ν