JUNE 23, 2026
I had read about drones being used to spray bugs (not chemicals) over vineyards, but the reality of actually seeing one at work was, pardon me, mega cool. I never thought much about how they worked, attributing it just to some distant, magical mechanics. But…in reality, it was much cooler than in words. And one starts to understand the immense applications where it is saving both time and money AND doing a better job.
Regenerative ag isn’t just about soil and the microbiome. It’s also about using natural predators. I have to wonder if the originators of IPM (integrated pest management) ever could have imagined how drones would become the work horses of IPM.
It’s the spinning columns on the bottom of the drones, whirring away, blending bugs with a medium (in most cases, vermiculite) to add more body to the breeze that got me. And the fact that the drone operator can remotely control the speed at which they spin, modifying the dosage rate on the (oh, excuse me) fly.
And then came the robots. Is that even the word for them? They looked nothing like the robots of sci-fi fame. (Remember the 1965 TV series Lost in Space?)
But robots will come in a separate article as I realize now that the drones deserve a post all their own.
And, last, but not least, the tech wows included a way to keep track of soil health progress–an essential but often unsung hero/heroine as part of a regenerative system that is based less on inputs and more on measurable outcomes.
Part 1
Parabug’s Bug Bomber Demo: The Way of A Drone Powered Bug Sprayer
Overview: Parabug is a beneficial insect applicator company based in Salinas. They use DJI drones modified for agricultural spraying. The drones, which have a 55-pound weight limit, are crucial for minimizing prop wash to avoid harming delicate insects. The company typically charges $20 per acre for insect applications, with the most expensive insect being the Anagyrus vladimiri (a parasitic wasp) for vineyards, costing $25 per wasp and $250 per acre for bugs alone.
They also work with Cryptolaemus montrouzieri, a mealy bug destroyer.
They have serviced vineyards up to 300 acres. Applications are more uniform than hand spraying and appear to be cost effective even for small growers.
This article is a minimally edited version of the audio taken from the demo. If you prefer to listen to the original audio, you can do so here.
See this post as God intended here. YOU GOTTA SEE IT WITH PHOTOS AND THE AUDIO LINK
THE MINDSET CONFERENCE DEMO
“Technically, although based in Salinas, I [Parabug rep] am from San Luis Obispo. I grew up here, and I fly everywhere from Oxnard, which is just north of LA, all the way to Paso Robles.
“Our work is really seasonal. We start the year with strawberries exclusively in the winter. That’s the second planting of strawberry crops. There’s a fall planting and a winter planting. The longer season is the winter planting that extends from November all the way to August when they’ll start ripping out fields.
“We do a lot of our work early on in the season with predatory mites. What we are is a beneficial insect applicator company, so we’re a specialized drone service company.
And we’re also a technology company.
“So this drone here is a DJI. So if you ever bought it like a little hobby drone yourself, it would actually just be this drone model, the same company.
“This is their smallest model of agricultural spray band, and we just modified it. So, typically this would have a two and a half gallon tank right here, and these nozzles here on the end. These are actually for spraying, we just don’t use them. So, we took out the tank and we added our control box, which is right here, we also power tap the battery.
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“I’m not constantly changing these out all day. This is our power tap that attaches to the battery and powers our system, so the control box in these two tube systems here. This is technology that our engineer developed in house. Our engineer is actually a full-time employee for John Deere, and this is a side gig. His wife is the general business owner and who runs day to day operations.
“My background is in entomology, so I’m really not a drone guy. I had never flown a drone before I started the job. Our operations manager taught me everything in a couple weeks, and then set me off on my own.
Question: Did you have to get a license?
“Yeah, there’s two licenses. There’s an FAA Part 107 which is what we operate under. Part 107 covers drones under 55 pounds.
“If you are over 55 pounds, you have to have what’s called the Part 137 and that’s a general business license, so that’s not even an individual licensing system.
“We really like the small drones for a reason.
“There’s a certain amount of prop wash that comes off of this.
Question: What is prop wash?
“Oh, the force applied by the propeller, right? When you have a larger drone, that force is higher, and the insects that we work with are really delicate, so if there’s any added force from the drone system itself, it could kill them while they’re being dispensed.
“Unfortunately, this drone model, I believe, is discontinued now, since this is a Chinese-made drone, which is currently being barred from import in the US.
“So we’re actually looking at other drone systems constantly. We have some pilots that don’t operate on this system.
“Parabug actually leases the technology, so that the tube system to other ag service companies, like Nutrien, flies with our system. There’s people in Canada, Australia, Washington, Oregon, Florida, that all can provide the same service that we do in house.”
Question: Who you get your bugs from, or do you manufacture bugs too?
“We do not.
“I actually used to work in an insectary briefly. I was a PCA for them. We had a weird little co-op system with our local growers. They shut down, and that’s actually who got me in contact with grower bugs.
“So I hopped from the insectary system to this.
“We don’t grow any insects in house. We can broker them for growers, but there’s just so many things that can go wrong with rearing insects.
“We don’t purchase insects . . .Typically, it’s growers. We give our growers free choice of the insectaries that they choose. If they have a system set up already, we can just hop in, and they can bargain for deals from different people. Happens quite a bit.
Question: What would you say is the scalability? Being worth it and not worth it? And what typical size do you usually service?
“For farms that are far away, we have a 50 acre minimum, and that comes out to $1,000, typically, where $20 per acre is our application cost, so we’re actually typically like a fraction of the cost compared to the insects themselves.
“I’ve picked up insect orders, which are like $150 per acre before, particularly for vineyards.
“Actually, the most expensive insect we work with is for vineyards, anagyrus vladimiri. It’s a mealybug parasitoid. I’ve heard it goes out upwards of 25 cents per wasp and 250 wasps per acre is typically the standard. [That translates to $62.50 per acre in bugs].
We do a lot of that for Sun Pacific in the Central Valley. They’re a table grape grower.
Question: What’s the biggest vineyard you do?
“We’ve done 300 acre vineyards in the San Joaquin Valley. We start in Arvin down south at the start of the season. We work our way north.
“We actually work with so many insects that we usually will end up buying out the stock at an insectary, or the insectary can’t even provide us the amount of insects we always need, because it’s not the scale that they’re typically used to working with.
Question: And those are conventional growers, for the most part, aren’t they?
Yeah.
Question: How long have you been doing this? How long has this been a part of the zeitgeist of farming in California?
“The insectary I worked at Associates Insectary has been around for 100 years… we think they’re the oldest in the country. It’s in Santa Paula. So it’s an hour north of L.A. and they reared Cryptolaemus montrouzieri, which is the mealy bug destroyer, which is the other insect that we typically will release in vineyards.
Question: So it’s releasing beneficial insects instead of using pesticide?
Yes.
Question: What is the survival rate as you drop?
“From our system? It’s comparable to hand release, but once they’re in the field, it’s totally dependent on weather and other things that have been applied.
Question: Are you forecasting before flights? Like, if there’s a wind event in the next 72 hours, are you going to drop bugs?
“Yeah. We don’t fly above 15 mile per hour winds. Usually our growers will just text me, and then I’ll check the weather that day, but I’m typically out in the field at sunrise to avoid any problems with the wind, especially here on the coast. I typically can’t fly past noon here.
Question: And then, is there an ideal temperature you want to be dropping bugs for like next 72 hours, or does it depends on the species?
How does that work? Because anagyrus, like every time I release them [by hand] you just hang a cup, whereas cryptolemus, it’s a little bit more tedious. But how do you release anagyrus?
“We release all the insects the same way. Okay, let me turn this on.
“You guys want a handout of the species we work with? I got some here, I can hand them out, and then they come with either the insects themselves, depends on the species.
“This is vermiculite. It’s a soil amendment. The insects come packed with that, typically because they respire in the packaging that wicks up moisture. So I’ll essentially just dumb insects into my tube systems like this.
“This is what we’ll use for vineyards, typically. It comes out of the drone uniformly, compared to vermiculite, which is relatively uneven.
“I use this in the field, but there’s no live insects in this demo.
“In practice, we mix the live insects in vermiculite. Sometimes they’re super minute. Sometimes they’ll come undiluted, so like lace-wing eggs, so it’ll just be mixed in this all of this tube.
Question: And you can you set application rates too?
“Yeah. Sometimes growers want two insects, and then that’s when I’ll have to do some tweaking.
“I actually have these two systems here attached to the drone. These are weight sensors, so every time I turn the drone on, it zeros out the weight.
“A fully loaded tube is about 32 ounces, and I can get about 12 acres per flight, so I’m typically aiming to be releasing about three ounces of material per acre.
Our big shtick is that it’s really hard to do a uniform hand release when you get hand release bottles. This is what they’ll look like in the field, and then your capsules…your grower will tell you, hey, put out 200 insects per acre, and you know it’s almost impossible to do that hand spraying.
“We work with so many species. Mites have a really low amount of ability to move. Parasitoids like anagyrus and crypto-lamus, they can move up to miles, especially depending on the wind.
TAKING OFF
“I can control the openings on these tubes remotely-the speed at which they spin. So these tubes are spinning while I fly, and that’s just how we get the uniform application.
“The big benefit that growers see is especially with things like mite species, those are aggregate pests, and mealy bugs as well.
When we do a uniform application, they get less hot spots in the field, and year over year, when we’re doing anagyrus, they’re seeing less mealy bugs, more mealy bug suppression, because the anagyrus will over winter.
“All right, I am going to take off. It’s gonna get pretty dusty if you guys want to face the other way.”
AUDIO
This article is a minimally edited version of the audio taken from the demo. If you prefer to listen to the original audio, you can do so here.
PARABUG STICKERS, CUPS AND MORE
Parabug also has really cool swag in their online shop. And a good Instagram channel with lots of videos. Their website has more information about the history of the company, too, which is pretty interesting.
Next up: The SAGA robots for mildew control. The UV kill spores AND eliminate the need for sulfur applications in the vines, something winemakers are quite excited about.
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