Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All righty, guys. Welcome back to the Drone on podcast or show. Depends where you're watching it on YouTube or listening to it on Spotify. I always want to say Shopify when I say Spotify, but it's. It's actually Spotify, not Shopify. We got Madison Raber with us. Thanks for being on.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: So for the guys that watch the YouTube channel, Drone de Recovery, I'm sure they have seen you in the past, but I just thought we'd get you on, kind of give, you know, what your background is, what it is that you actually do. But then you also do drones on the side. You've been helping me basically almost since season one. I did season one.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: And then.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: And then you hopped on. You were, you know, flying our drones, but then you ended up getting your own. But what is it that you do most of the time, full time, if you're not flying?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Yeah, so I own Tree Stand Forestry. It's a small consulting company in the forestry space. I work primarily with deer hunters. We do timber harvests centered around habitat improvement and improving properties for hunting. Generally speaking, I do work with some, you know, clients that don't have that mindset. They don't really care about the hunting side of things. So we're looking at strictly managing the timber over the long term.
But, you know, that is my bread and butter day in and day out. And then because of that, I work a lot with, like I said, hunting clients. Come fall, I work myself out of a job. And so it worked out pretty well to pick up the drone in the fall and be able to do recoveries, you know, as. As that side of things slows down.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: So timbering, it's always been in your family, right? Your dad's like. Is he a logger?
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's been in the family over, like, 55 years.
Grandpa started logging back in the day, then dad bought the company off of him. And then, you know, I started working for him in the summers when I was out of school, and then full time when I was 18 years old and.
And then went on my own four or five years ago now.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: So you do select timber harvesting, but your focus is more on building habitat for hunters, right? Yes.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Yeah. So, you know, a general timber harvest, you know, it's going to depend on who the buyer is. I mean, there's so many different ways of doing cuts. Anywhere from just, you know, you have your clear cut, you have a diameter cut, you have selective harvest. There's so many different ways of going about it. My Approach, generally speaking is we're trying to create browse and cover on the forest floor. Now that being said, I don't want to clear cut the whole woods. I don't want to make it so thick the deer can't get through it. My goal is to, to do a selective harvest across most of the forest and then we'll do little clear cut bedding pockets. And that's based off of where food is access. There's so many variables that go into that, but you know those, those are the type of things that we're looking at.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Nice. And obviously you were saying coming toward the fall, guys don't usually want you stomp through woods. Right.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: It's been a little bit different this year with ehd. You know, some of the, a lot of the clients that I work with are southeastern Ohio is the core of it. And you know, we've been hit so hard with ehd, there's like, ah, let's just, you know, it's a good time to get work done.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Tell us more. So ehd for the folks that don't know it was news, basically everybody was talking about the EHD stuff that was going on down on how. And then you and I went down there because you have some land down there and we, we did fly around. It wasn't looking good. And then you did a. Basically a. Her senses yourself.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Yep.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: So it's pretty bad.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's, it's rough, it's pockety. So I'm in, I'm in Morgan county is where my farm is at. Some of the worst hit were Megs, Washington and Athens. So. Right. I'm kind of right on that edge. And so some of those counties like are almost wiped out. Like a really bad like probably 70 to 80% kill in a lot of areas where I'm at. I'm right on that edge where, you know, on my side of the ravine, from what I saw previously, I would say 60 to 70% kill based off of the survey that I did back in November and then.
But on the other side of the ravine actually where you and me parked to fly that, like that side over there, that farm, he had 40 deer on his ridge the other day.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Well, that's good.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's really good. So you know, it's, you know, there wasn't a ton of deer outside of that then. It's not like all the neighbors have a bunch of deer as well. But it is pretty pockety where I'm at. So you know, I Have hope that that area itself will recover from fairly quickly.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: But some of those areas down south are just hammered.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Huh. So guys are. Are cool with you going through their woods now because of there's not a lot of deer there. So do you use your thermal drone like say. Say a guy wants you to come in and. Yeah. Do a management plan of some kind. Do you fly your thermal drone at all, See if there's deer in the area first and then come back later and do the same thing? Have you ever done that?
[00:04:41] Speaker B: Yeah, we have done some of that. I do a little bit. You know, for instance, I had a CL in Athens is prior to EHD hitting, you know, he had his 80 some acres and wanted to kind of know how the deer are utilizing it. We're looking at if a timber cut would be worth doing in his scenario because he didn't have a lot of timber and we're trying to evaluate that. But he had a lot of COVID on his ground, but a lot of it was invasive. And so we flew the drone up and found zero deer in that invasive section and they were all back in the open hardwoods.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Invasive. Are you talking autumn olive or.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: That was honeysuckle and autumn olive. Yeah.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: Honeysuckle. Yeah.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Okay. Yep. And so, you know, I'm using it in. In that sense. You know, obviously the thermal drone, it's not like it's lidar or something where I can use it to cruise timber, but with. With the thermal, you know, I am using it in with what I'm doing day to day. I mean, I've got, you know, a client coming up here in a little bit, and we'll probably be doing, you know, we're looking at doing a cut. But also, hey, you know, do you want to add in at a pretty cheap rate to quick do a herd survey to see what's in your area?
[00:05:43] Speaker A: So it just seems like it goes hand in hand.
You're already doing it. The drone's probably in your truck and you can just fly it out, see what you see.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: I was on another podcast, the same one that you were on, Legacy Hikers. And that was something that was brought up about finding. Let's say it's a piece of property that you want to buy, like you fly it. There's not deer there now, but can you make it good enough to bring deer? Right. That would be really cool, but I think that would take probably two, three, four, maybe five years or not necessarily.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you can. So I just recently did a large survey for if Any of you have watched the Hunter podcast? Jeremy Flynn, he's got a big Ohio farm. I would have done his timber on on that farm. And so we just did a survey on his Ohio piece a couple weeks ago and it was super interesting. We are two years after the cut. You know, food plots have been established. We've been in doing all this work on this property and you know, there was some EHD right at his farm there, but it wasn't nearly as bad. And so he flew the entire area and compared to. So he had 230 acres, roughly. And I think we flew a thousand acres. And compared to the acres around that farm, it held double the amount of deer.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Compared to the farms around it. Wow. On a per acre basis, it was crazy.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: So I've been thinking about, like putting more effort in. I. I've asked you a little bit about our land over there, but I just feel like that land is so frigging hard with all the houses around it.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: It is actually.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: To actually get the whole deer in there. I don't know. But for some reason I'm just starting to want to have a farm where I can go and I know that there's deer going to be living on it.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Yeah, it's tough. I mean it. Unless you have a huge farm, it's tough to consistently have a buck living on it. Even on that survey, for example, he had.
So he's got 230 acres. It's a pretty big farm.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: And it's not big, not a flat farm either. It's got a lot of roll terrain and so it's bigger than what it even looks. And he had a buck that he had on camera several days before, and he's like, hey, this is a new deer or a buck that I recognized from earlier in the year that came through. That deer was nowhere on the property. I mean, on a thousand acres, that deer was not in the area. He was gone. And then three days later, after a survey, he's like, hey, he's back again. But that goes to show you those deer are moving huge areas.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: Huh?
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Now I will say there's a couple tiny little pockets where there was some really dense pines. You know, tiny chance he was in there. I really doubt it, though, from what.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: I've seen that you're saying you could.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: We could have missed. Okay. But it was such a small amount compared to what was around. I really don't think that was the case.
I had a buddy that I did a survey for, he had one shooter left on his property after EHD and he has a 40. So it's a really small piece. Yeah. And he got a picture of him on. So I was going to do it at like noon. One o' clock is when I was going to do the survey. He got a picture of this deer at 10 o' clock on his 40.
He has a camera right across the property line on the other side of his farm on, on public gets a picture of him 15 minutes there on that camera.
And so I made a big loop around looking for that deer. An hour after his last picture.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: I couldn't, couldn't find them. Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: It's now that was November. So they're cruising, but they're cruising. They cover ground, dude.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: Oh yeah. It's like if a deer would only walk one mile per hour in one hour he's a mile away.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: And you know that they walk faster than a mile though. That's cool. I don't know if you want to talk about it. You mentioned lidar. You've been talking about doing this lidar thing.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: I know, yeah. So something that has really fascinated me is the lidar technology is finally getting somewhat reasonable on the price.
That's the biggest issue thus far. But they're already using it out west and in some different scenarios basically using lidar to cruise timber. And it's, it's using that technology to penetrate the canopy. And they're right now using it primarily on pine trees because they're much more uniform, much more, much easier to.
For the software to be able to calculate board feet in those trees.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: When you came up with this, I was like, sounds very difficult. But guys are doing it.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Oh yeah, no, no, no. It's, it's being done because I could.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Understand using lidar to penetrate the canopy to get the, you know, the topo of how it lay.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: And that's typically how guys use lidar is to remove the canopy. And, and this was, you know, I'm using it because I want to see what the trees look like.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Dude, that would be wild. So you would just fly the forest area that you're wanting to look at and then you put it in a software or whatever and then you have to do the calculate calculation of how many board feet standing there.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: No, I mean, I think the software does it for you. There's some, some pieces of software out there. But again the examples that I've seen done currently they're using it on pretty uniform timber.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: The cool part about is a lot of these lidar sensors, they have RGB as well with them. So they're actually able to use the RGB camera then to do species identification. Where I see it going in the future on the hardwood side of things is, you know, every different species has a general way that they grow on, even the limb structure and all of that. I think it's going to get to the point to where, you know, I can identify generally what treat is even without the RGB would be my guess. I might be wrong on that, but I could see it getting to that point.
[00:11:16] Speaker C: So the question is, are you going to be a contributor to that data set?
[00:11:20] Speaker B: Oh, as soon as. Yeah, yeah. So.
[00:11:22] Speaker C: Because it's going to need how many thousands of references?
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:26] Speaker C: I mean, correlate something.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: So DJI just came out with their Zenmoose 3.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: Yeah, that thing looks.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: And, and so, you know, the problem with the previous sensor was it didn't seem like. So the, the industry standard from what I've seen is a rock R3 and, and that's a really. But that's a 360. So you don't really need a 360. You need a downward sensing. And so that's what the Zenmoose 2 would have had. But from what I was, you know, looking at, the accuracy on that wasn't up to par with the rock.
And so I think this new one, just from a little bit that I've looked at, it might be closer and it's so much more reasonable on price.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: Yeah. I was gonna say that's the biggest problem with what you're wanting to do is the investment it takes upfront.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You're looking at like 100 grand.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Just to try to figure it out.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: Yep. I mean I can't. And the thing is, in my current, the way my business is structured currently, you know, I do a lot of appraisals and like tax bases and different things like that that it would be extremely useful in. But it doesn't necessarily make me more money. It just makes my work easier.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: So I have a hard time justifying spending $100,000 to try it.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
This isn't somebody. That somebody would be hiring you specifically for a LIDAR data set on their board. Feet maybe, but not usually.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: I've talked to some, some mills and stuff. So in my area, a lot of mills, you know, a lot of most of the timber does not get bought through a consulting forester like myself. And I'm aware of that. I don't have an issue with that. And a lot of those guys are not buying marked timber. They're going through and just estimating how much they think is there. Now, landowners, generally speaking, are smarter than they were, you know, 20 years ago, and they're getting multiple people to come in and place bids on those trees.
But what can happen is, you know, if you say you've got three mills trying to come in and compete for those same trees, but they're not marked, they don't know actually how much is there. And if it's several hundred acres, that can be extremely time consuming to figure out how much board feed is actually in that woods. Oh yeah. So, you know, if, if they can have somebody like myself, whether it's the landowner or even one of the mills wanting to place a bid, you know, it could, it would be worth multiple thousands of dollars in some cases to have me come out and fly that and have an accurate number so they can put an accurate bid in.
[00:13:37] Speaker A: I thought about buying the equipment and letting you try to figure it out.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Hey, I'm all for that.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: It's like we got so much going on the way it is it. I just don't know how we're gonna find the time, but.
[00:13:48] Speaker C: So maybe you're saying that the price point of this, just this lens that you're gonna drop onto a drone is 100k.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: The rock R3, I think was between 60 and 80. From 60 from what I was seeing. And then you have the.
What is that drone that you would need?
[00:14:05] Speaker A: You'd probably put it on an M400 now. Yes, yeah, that's what I would put it on.
[00:14:09] Speaker C: Okay, so your total package, total package of 100,000 and drone for the payload. But you could use that drone for other.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: Oh yeah, I would get a thermal thermal lens for it and stuff. What I was looking at was the, the new Zenmos 3, that's only 15, 20 grand.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Oh yeah, they're not bad.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: I mean, I think your whole setup would be 35,000.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Oh, geez.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Hmm. So that's, I mean, nice. That's at the point to where I'm like probably 40, 45.
[00:14:36] Speaker A: Yeah, what about software? Don't, don't you need software? And that's probably going to be a monthly cost or.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: No, that's not even sure what software I would need to be using because there are some, you know, pretty small, pretty janky looking softwares that people are using. Frankly, I don't know if from the little bit I've seen, DJI's own native software won't work yet. Okay, so.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Huh.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: So that's probably the biggest missing link.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: So is the software to.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Okay. Interesting. I, you know, somebody listening to this. If you guys do lidar like this, maybe reach out to Madison.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Fantastic.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: And tell them what you do. Or if you're willing to share. There was a guy north of here, and I forget who he works for, but they do all lidar, mostly surveying for property projects and stuff like that.
Your thermal business. We're going to pivot over to, you know, you. You bought a. You bought a thermal drone after flying, did you fly our equipment for two years or was it just for one year?
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it was kind of weird, so I kind of started flying. We did some surveys at the end of the year. Right. At the end of season. January sometime is when I kind of. After I got my certification in December.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: From our 107.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: Oh, dude. You walked up to us at the Mount Hope show. I remember you had just gotten your license that day. Yeah.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: And so then at that point, ran with you guys a few times. And then after that, that whole next season, I flew with your equipment to believe.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Okay. When we did. When we were doing those herd census, were we going to other states or was it locally here?
[00:16:09] Speaker B: That was. You had done some out of state. This was just local stuff. Yeah. Yep.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: I didn't know if you had any good stories of us traveling. I remember we were doing.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: I got.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: We call on either herd senses or herd analysis or, you know, surveys. But so if we're flopping back and forth, that's usually what we're talking about. First year, we were driving ourselves, like, to Kentucky to try to catch the weather, and you know how difficult that can be. You guys just got back from a big one in Pennsylvania. Doggone all. We were all packed into this little car trying to get all of our equipment, our thermal drones in there.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: You took the focus, dude.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: I. I think we had the focus.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Dude, what are you doing?
[00:16:46] Speaker C: Wait, so you took the focus and you don't have any photographic evidence? Have you guys.
[00:16:51] Speaker A: I got it, like, rolled in there.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: I remember that. I remember you guys going down there. Yeah. Because it was you and Dennis and Matt.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: This was, like, way earlier. This was me, Jason and Roger from a high drone repair.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Oh, God.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, those were the only people that I. That I knew that had thermal drones that could help. Yeah. That's crazy.
You. You had your pin on the pilot locator map on the drone day recovery website. You had that originally down where your land is, right?
[00:17:20] Speaker B: Yeah. So basically what happened then? So I Flew that first year under your guys's stuff. Basically, you sent me whatever extra leads you had flying your own equipment.
And then the following year, that was when Matt and Dennis started really helping you guys out with that. And then I flew a little bit of your equipment the first couple months, but there wasn't much work. And then I bought my own drone. Middle of October, I think, is what it was.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Why did you decide? Did you want to buy your own thermal drone?
[00:17:47] Speaker B: It was something that, again, I mean, it worked so well with what I was doing in my business, as far as, you know, the flexibility of it. I love hunting myself, and so as much as I, like, don't get a lot of work in the fall, I also don't take on a lot of work in the fall. I just. I basically go hunting.
And so, you know, it works well to be able to. To be hunting during the day, and if I have my pin in the same area that I'm hunting, you know, do calls after it gets dark and then come home at midnight. You know, that's typically what happens. So.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: So when you made that pivot to buy your own equipment, you had asked me, you were, you know, mike, do you think I'm going to be able to pay this off? Because, let's be honest, there were a ton of people, and there's still a ton of people getting into it.
You did buy. You ended up buying it.
You did pay it off that season, then?
[00:18:33] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, the first year, I more than paid it off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I probably. I think I. Maybe you gave me maybe a little bit of a deal on one, but I think I made 12 or 13,000.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: Oh, on top of, like, actually paying your equipment?
[00:18:45] Speaker B: No, no, no. That was. That was gross. Yeah. So I think. I think paid what, like 10 for the drone or something?
[00:18:50] Speaker A: I don't.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: I don't remember. Yeah, something like that.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: Nice. So. All right, now we're moving forward. You got your thermal drone. You were. You had your pin down there where.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: We were just talking about. Yes.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. How'd that affect you this year? Would you say it had any effect on the calls?
[00:19:06] Speaker B: Yeah, pretty majorly. So I moved my pin up in.
Straight east of me in Carroll county, which is a, you know, pretty heavily hunted area, and it's. It's closer to me, more like half an hour. And, you know, because of the hd, I assumed I wouldn't get any calls down there. Well, I was right. You know, I did a lot of work down there and got almost no repeat clients. From last year. And I've talked to other guys that I've know personally that do this and they've been, you know, a big part of their work this year was repeat clients. And so I think that did hurt me. That being said, I still had a great year.
I mean, how many you got? I probably did 40, 45, which, you know, I don't. Compared to a lot of guys, isn't that great. But for me, you know, I've got young kids. I'm not like I was turning down some work.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: I mean, it's when he's saying he got young kids. You have twin girls.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: And then a four year old and a four year old.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: Yeah, we got our hands full. So, you know, I'm trying to do, you know, do what I can here. So it's not like I'm, I'm going to take on every, you know, you crawl into bed at 10 o' clock and get a call. There's a few times where I was like, no, I'm not going.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say that's probably the first year you went, but now it's like, yeah, we ran all.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Over the place, the state. I mean, we were going far.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: Yeah. That is something that I had Henry on the podcast and we were talking about for the people that don't hesitate and, you know, don't say no. If they're going to say as soon as somebody calls them and they're going to do it, they're probably going to get the work.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, no, no, no. I mean, that's, that's a huge. If this was my main business, that's the only way to do it. I mean, you know, if, if you're going to turn down work because you're tired, you're going to lose a business. That's just, that's how it works for myself. This is very much, you know, just extra income on the side. You know, frankly, I had, you know, a good fall in the timber side as well. I had more work than I typically to do. I killed my deer opening weekend in Ohio here. Did a little bit of hunting out of state. But, you know, for the most part I was very available and made myself available for whatever work I could get. And so it wasn't like I had to be doing these drone calls. It was just taking on what I wanted to, essentially. And then really things have kind of shifted to doing, you know, a large. Looking at my, you know, P. L for the year, like a bigger and bigger part of it is these herd Analysis rather than the recoveries.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: Nice. Are you willing to travel anywhere if somebody's listening to this? Because guys are calling me drone deer to come do their herd census.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, we got a team of guys. We'll be there.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we can handle it. Or they can handle it.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: We just.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: I usually toss it off to you.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: Yeah, we just did a giant one. We. We did one in pa. Don't come at us. Hang on, hang on. High fence. High fence. And these are. It's one of those scenarios where it's not a public resource at this point anymore. As far as the DNR is concerned. They, you know, they're able to bait and they're able to hunt year round. And so it was an issue to do the survey.
[00:22:01] Speaker A: Talking about pa.
Why wouldn't you be allowed to do her census? Like they say, if you're tracking a deer, you're hunting it. But here, you're not tracking a deer whatsoever. Right.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: It's a little bit of a, you know, whatever I would look at as a pretty gray area. You know, we had. So I got one client that we're going to be doing in the future here, and he had talked to his local dnr, and they were just like, absolutely not. Not over. Absolutely not.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: So, oh, geez, I'd almost be willing to go over there and lease 100 acres and let the DNR know that I'm counting deer anyways.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: So.
[00:22:33] Speaker C: Wait, why would you do that, Mike?
Walk me through that thought process.
[00:22:37] Speaker A: Why I would do that. Yeah. Is like, I. I believe it's government overreach. It's total government overreach. That telling, you know, Madison, say you got 100 acres in Pennsylvania, and you. And you genuinely want to look at your property. Maybe there's trespassers, maybe there's a bunch of coyotes. Maybe. Whatever the scenario is, you're telling Madison he cannot look at a deer with his thermal drone. That's government overreach. Like.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: No, I agree. It's. I mean, it's pretty insane, but. Yeah.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Yeah. At the same time, the reason I would do it is I would fight it out in court. And, you know, let's see. Does, you know, whatever your argument is, will it stand up? And I just don't see how it will, because that's like telling me, you know, don't fly your ultralight airplane with a thermal in your hand looking around.
Let's not get to go down that route.
[00:23:26] Speaker B: See, Mike, you and me have very different ways of looking at things. I look at the rules that I have to work with and like, what's the best way to do something within that given parameter? And you're looking at it like, why just make my own rules?
[00:23:38] Speaker A: No, no, explain it. No, explain it. That's good. You bring it up.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: Okay. No, I'm just like, you know, when I look at anything, whether it's. Whatever it is, I'm just like, okay. I mean these are, I'm just not a, like typically don't think outside the box as much.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: Given a set of exactly why drone day recovery was not a thing until somebody like me said, no, no, you're right.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: I'm not saying it's a bad thing at all. I think it's a good thing. I'm just. That is not the way my mind naturally wants to work.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Yeah, you're.
[00:24:04] Speaker C: You're wired completely.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Let's think about Indiana for a second. Like, Indiana would have never been legal to do drone deer recovery. And there were guys there that said we're going to do it. And then some legislators seen what they're doing, they're like, okay, let's make it black and white. And they did.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: And so if everybody would bow to the government for everything they say, nothing would ever move forward. Yeah, it, I mean, let's be honest, rules always come after the technology is there. It's like the AI thing right now. Right. They're saying, oh, we got to govern this somehow. Well, it's here now. They're trying to figure out how to govern AI. So yeah, I'm that guy. You know, call me call, call me cocky, call me whatever. I just do what I want. No, it's. Yes, I do, but it's, there's a, for a better reason.
[00:24:50] Speaker C: Yeah, there is a thought behind it is you're provoking so that there is a ruling or there's a more of a look at than just a couple of guys in a county that are, you know, making this statement because that's their opinion.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:03] Speaker C: We're going into something. We're basically going above them, going to the higher ups and the, you know, the state basically.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: And really, you know what's crazy to me though is like we, the people, we get to have a say in a lot of these things. But the government is saying, no, you don't. Like this just happened in, I think it was Idaho. So they put a survey out, the DNR of Idaho, don't hold me to the state, but this is out west, I should look at the dm. They put a survey out to the hunters and they wanted to ask them, would you want this technology to be able to be used?
53% said yes. The other percentage said no. And they still said no. Then we're not doing it. Wait, what was the point of you asking the sportsman if you want it or not when you don't give a what they said?
[00:25:52] Speaker B: I'm kind of surprised it was that divided, though, like, down the middle. That's crazy.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I should try to find that.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:25:58] Speaker C: What technology are you referring to, Mike?
[00:26:00] Speaker A: Using thermal drones or aerial vehicles to recover game.
[00:26:05] Speaker C: To recover.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: It's going to be hard for me to find it right now.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: The west is not a world.
[00:26:10] Speaker C: I wanted to clarify what exactly you're referring to. I assume the technology was thermal.
[00:26:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, they've got some law. I mean, some states out there. You can't even use a light on your site. It's wild.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
I don't know. It's one of those things where it's like. I think a lot of things in the industry were pushed prior to knowing what you can and can't do.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: Probably trail cams were the same way. Using electronic aid in the help of a hunt or whatever. Like, did you ever look at that? Like, you're not allowed to use, like, electronics or something?
[00:26:42] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Your phone.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: And I mean, even in Pennsylvania, for example, the way that law is written, basically, if it's not stated in the rulebook that you're allowed to use it, that means you can't use it. Truck hammers are not in that list.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: But everybody uses it.
[00:26:57] Speaker B: Yep. So technically. Technically, truck cameras. Illegal in pa. Yeah.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: But they only enforce what they want. Exactly. And that's why it's like it came up in pa. And I'm going to keep talking about it because I think it's complete bs. And our podcast with Josh is going crazy late because people are getting the story of how he was charged. But in, you know, they. They literally make whatever rules they want, or they. What is that called? Where they.
They basically enforce it however they want. So on this thermal drone, they want to be that first warden that writes somebody a ticket with this new technology, you know, to put it on their. On their books.
But where was I going? This.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: What's really hard about it is, is somebody with a name is the one that's going to have problems. You know, they see drone, deer recovery. I mean, that's. You know, if you're associated, that's. That's what they want to get.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Yeah. 100%. I mean, you're pointing Out. Just what's happening with Western. Western Diesel right now?
[00:27:56] Speaker B: I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I haven't followed it real closely, but I've seen some of that.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Perfect example. They're not going to come after me or Madison or Landon that bought a Ferrari in, you know, Montana, because they're never going to find out about it. You know, like you're going to. Yeah, well.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: And I mean, you know, I know a lot of, you know, bigger names in the hunting industry, and, like, the level of scrutiny that they are under constantly is crazy. And, you know, I mean, I. Then on the other side, you know, I know people that, you know, kind of walk up, you know, pretty, you know, line on. On, you know, whether it's legal or not. And it's like, you know, whether or not you can get away with it. But if you've got a big name, there's no way.
[00:28:38] Speaker A: I mean, that's. Yeah, yeah, I said Montana on purpose. I know it's Montana, but where I'm. I'm going to circle back to Pennsylvania. The reason I brought this up is, right, it was about using a drone to recover a potentially, you know, deer. But then we find out that actually you can't even track your deer legally.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: Drone or no drone. That came up after the fact that once this whole drone technology got started. So that's what I'm saying. So years and years and years that they've all been hunting in PA and they're tracking their deer after hours. Right. Like legal shooting light. It stops. Right. Then you cannot track your deer. But yet that was never enforced.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: Until the thermal drones came.
[00:29:24] Speaker C: Are they. They're actively enforcing that now? Yes. Do you know?
[00:29:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:27] Speaker B: Really?
[00:29:27] Speaker A: Like, yes.
[00:29:28] Speaker C: So because of this. Yeah, because it came up.
[00:29:31] Speaker A: You have to call the Pennsylvania Game Commission if you're going to track a.
[00:29:35] Speaker C: Deer after sunset, which is wild.
[00:29:39] Speaker B: Tell me your back is in a corner without telling me your back is in a corner.
[00:29:42] Speaker C: Exactly 100.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: But that is wild. You know, people aren't doing that. But can you imagine the calls the. The Game Commission would field every night. Hey. Just won't let you know I'm gonna be tracking a deer. Okay. Why do they have to know? They don't need to know.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: This is insane.
I didn't know that.
[00:30:00] Speaker C: But what does it point to? It points to they feel like they own the deer or are they just trying to keep everybody safe? Safe.
[00:30:09] Speaker A: What is.
[00:30:09] Speaker C: What is the impetus? What is driving this?
Like you said, Madison, like, tell me your backs in the corner.
[00:30:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's. You've kind of dug yourself in a hole, so keep digging, I guess.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: No, it's just. To me, it was so, so dumb to think that all these things came up after the fact because all of a sudden you've seen this technology and you're like, I'm gonna enforce that.
[00:30:34] Speaker B: Right?
[00:30:34] Speaker A: Well, you haven't been enforcing everything else. Well, then all of a sudden you figure out, well, if I'm going to enforce the thermal drone to look for a carcass, then I have to enforce that. You better call me when you're going to go track one after the fact.
[00:30:46] Speaker B: It just goes to show you how messed up a lot of the regulations are. They don't make sense. They're outdated. There's so many things that have changed since those regulations. And like, like you said, you know, the hunt, I mean, the way hunting has progressed has changed along with that. But, you know, they've just sort of turned a. Turn to blind eye to a lot of these regulations that were in place.
[00:31:07] Speaker C: So can we just speculate what is the actual time frame to see some of these things change and adapted to. Right. So talk about Pete. We get so many messages on Instagram, Facebook, people asking about any news or updates on Michigan. Any news or updates on pa yeah, like, can we just speculate what's the timeline for the people making decisions to actually get something new on the books?
[00:31:32] Speaker A: I think PA is really bad. I don't know if you have any history with them, but I've heard like, the dog tracking thing took Pa 10 years to say you're allowed to use a dog to track.
[00:31:45] Speaker B: So the other problem too is. I know, you know, and another problem is each, each state is set up different the way, you know, their, their DNR from the regular. You know, a lot of the, the regulations can't necessarily be set even by the dnr, which I'm not sure how pay is. PA is structured. They might be different.
[00:32:02] Speaker A: Yeah, they're different.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:32:04] Speaker A: They're, they're independent. They can make. Right.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: But, you know, some of the complaints with Ohio is that there's such a delay in, in some of these things. And it's because the DNR can't make those regulations.
[00:32:13] Speaker A: 100%. Yeah, 100%. But that's why legislation was written. There's a senator that wrote a legislation bill in PA to make it black and white. You can use a thermal drone to, you know, find a carcass. Well, that won't take off. He can't get enough people to back the bill.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: The people in PA can support the bill, but unless he gets some of his colleagues to keep pushing this bill forward, it will not go anywhere. That's. It's just so crazy to me. The more that we've been in this business, and I don't want to deal with politics, but we have been dealing with it. But like Indiana, the reason that bill got pushed so fast is you had a real sportsman. It was a deer hunter that just happened to be in this role of helping, you know, push Bill through. And he got his buddy on it because he could explain the bill to him, and his buddy was like, oh, yeah, this makes total sense. So, you know, boom. Bill was through literally, like six months. Black and white deer recovery is legal in the state of Indiana.
[00:33:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: But this guy in PA can't, you know, it's not getting any traction.
[00:33:22] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah.
[00:33:23] Speaker A: It's just a shame.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's definitely, you know, power plays and. Yeah. It's just. I think there's a lot of stuff going on there that it's.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: But Madison would be the one that would just rather not deal with the conflict, probably.
[00:33:36] Speaker B: I just.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: That's all.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: I don't care. Honestly. I just don't, frankly. I live in Ohio. It's not really my problem.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: I like it.
[00:33:46] Speaker C: So. So for going off of the legalizing the dogs, being able to be involved. 10 years, so let's just half that. But that still puts us out a really long time to get something changed in the books for PA. Well, PA.
[00:33:59] Speaker A: Is in it already for three years because it was season two when that guy was charged and so. Or he wasn't charged.
[00:34:06] Speaker C: It was all.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: It all fell apart. But.
So, yeah, maybe we're another two years away.
Don't hold your breath because it's still pretty helpful.
[00:34:18] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: You hunt, pa?
[00:34:20] Speaker B: I did a little bit this year. Yeah. Like I said, I tagged out opening weekend here in Ohio and just about went nuts, so I had to find places to hunt. So. Yeah.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: How'd the PA hunting go?
[00:34:29] Speaker B: It was fun. I. I had like. I did a lot of public land mobile hunting. Just run and gun. Had a blast with it. Never got on anything really that I was interested in shooting. I had one pretty nice nine pointer that I passed up, but still a chance I might go out here late season yet. I got a buddy out there that runs a bunch of cameras on public and I picked up the recurve, so I've been messing around with that. So I might shoot that same deer that I passed up If I got a chance with.
[00:34:53] Speaker A: No way. If you shoot it. Have you ever shot a deer with a recurve?
[00:34:57] Speaker B: No, this will be the first.
[00:34:58] Speaker A: Holy smokes. So I used to shoot longbow, which is basically same thing. I could shoot a target, but, man, I sucked at trying to really shoot an animal. Interesting. The wheels just fell off. I literally could. I don't remember.
Like, I would see the deer and I would pull back and shoot, but I forgot to look where I want to shoot. I was looking at the deer. I just wasn't looking at the spot.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: Were you hitting the antlers or what was happening there? It was all over the place.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: It was all over the place.
[00:35:26] Speaker C: Were you doing any filming on this mic?
Do you have any footage?
[00:35:29] Speaker A: I don't think I do.
[00:35:31] Speaker C: Like, show me. Show me the archives.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Honestly, it got to the point where I was so sick of it. Like, it took me three years to kill a deer with my longbow, and I was so over it. I was just focusing on any deer at this point.
Shot a little baby deer, like, just had to get it done.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:35:49] Speaker C: But, like, you're hunting from the ground in all this.
[00:35:52] Speaker A: Are you up? I was trying. Yep. I was trying from the ground for a long time. And then finally I think. Think the deer that I ended up killing was from a tree then. Yeah. Yeah, I like that ground stuff. Do you?
[00:36:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I enjoy some of the technology on the. On the tree stands and stuff is. And, you know, gotten so much better over the last 10 years. And so, you know, I'm running like a lone wolf. Custom gear 0.5. It's a super minimalist small platform tree stand. Hang on, you know, run two sticks with an eight, or I can be up in a tree in six minutes.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: What?
[00:36:22] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. No time flat.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: Wait, how.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: Ready to hunt?
[00:36:25] Speaker A: How. How do the steps work? It's just like. You do the cranking things.
[00:36:29] Speaker B: Oh, no, no, no, no. It's not that. This. These are like, basically like a double step. And then, you know, you hang them on. And I have what's called an 8 or so. All that first step, I reach as high up above me as I can, and then I hang my aider, and it's like a little rope ladder that comes down. And frankly, I mean, there's a lot of times that I'm only hunting 8 to 10 foot off the ground. So sometimes I can hunt with just that first stick. And then every now and then, I'll throw my second one up yet to get an extra 2, 3 foot out of it.
[00:36:55] Speaker A: Wait, so you're in a tree, but no higher than 10ft at times?
[00:37:00] Speaker B: At the most, 12 to 15 is the highest I go. Yeah.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: I'm typically looking for. And you know, the whole purpose of even doing that at that point is. Is to be able to have a little bit of a better vantage point, you know, if you're hunting. You know, for instance, where I kill my deer this year in Ohio, I was 3 foot off the ground in a tree stand, which sounds kind of. Of dumb, but it was grass, like real tall grass. And I had to be just up high enough. But any.
[00:37:22] Speaker A: Any.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: The only trees around it were like these little junky trees that you couldn't really get in without being skyline and look ridiculous. And so, you know, they were going to see you as soon as they walk in. So I was tucked up in this little apple tree, you know, with a bunch of COVID around me, and I had does at 7 yards. Never saw me. Wow. Okay.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: I'm very interested because I was. I actually. I'm trying to film a video right now. It's not going well. I. I was like, dude, I'll. I'm gonna saddle hunt, like. And I went out and bought myself a tree. Like a actual. Not a tree saddle. I bought myself a climbing gear. What I used to wear to cut trees down. Yeah, no, it's not built for that.
[00:37:59] Speaker B: Yeah, it's.
[00:38:00] Speaker A: And so I like the mobile. That's why I like hunting on the ground. But like you were just saying, the vantage point is socks. Yep. So I gotta check your rig.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I got it actually in the truck. When you take a look at it when we're done here, it's a. It's real light, you know, and that's. I think what I love about the back to the traditional gear is how light everything is and how minimalist it is. I literally have my stand, my two sticks. I don't run a pack. I don't run nothing with a traditional. No binoculars, no rangefinder. Me and my bow and my stand and that's it.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: Huh.
[00:38:31] Speaker B: And love that. Just no clutter, no junk. None of this, like, ropes fricking everywhere. It just don't like it at all. So. And I can be up and up and out of a tree so quick. And then I spend. Frankly, most. Like I was. I was out in Illinois end of October. And, you know, the way most of that would go is I would hunt the first two hours. In the morning, I would get down, I would scout all day.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:38:54] Speaker B: And then I would hunt the last Three hours in the evening, and I put on.
[00:38:58] Speaker A: And you may have moved your stand from the morning, you're saying.
[00:39:00] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I never hunted. I had hunted one spot twice. I put on 20 miles that week.
[00:39:06] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: But was on 20 miles walking or.
[00:39:08] Speaker A: 20 miles walking, yeah.
[00:39:10] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: And.
But I was on big deer, you know, because, I mean, it just. Especially on, you know, new ground. I've never been on that piece before, you know, figuring out where the deer are at, what they're doing.
[00:39:20] Speaker A: Definitely not using your thermal drone.
[00:39:23] Speaker B: No. I didn't even take it with my kind of. I ended up shooting one in the freaking leg. Like, I tell everybody not to, but I. I wish I had it then, but, yeah, I. It wasn't legal, so I was a good boy and didn't take it with me.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:37] Speaker C: Are you the oldest child?
[00:39:38] Speaker B: I am, yeah.
[00:39:41] Speaker C: You follow all the rules, firstborn, yo.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: No, are you.
You're born as well.
[00:39:49] Speaker C: First firstborn. Follow all the rules, man.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: Meanwhile, Mike is one. Yeah. Like, the youngest.
[00:39:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah.
[00:39:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: No way.
[00:39:57] Speaker C: 100.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Tell me more.
[00:39:59] Speaker C: Tell me you're. Tell me you're not the firstborn without telling.
[00:40:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I got. Like I said, we got three kids, and I can already tell which one's which. Just. I mean, just their personalities and the way they. Oh, yeah. Big time, huh?
[00:40:11] Speaker A: Jacobe's not old enough yet. I think he's just like a year and a half. But it's a lot different with a boy than a girl. You. You don't know that yet?
[00:40:19] Speaker B: No, I don't know.
Going to have another one probably at some point. We'll see.
[00:40:24] Speaker A: Hopefully it's not twins again, but pray really hard.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
Love my twins to death, but, man, I don't want to go through that again.
[00:40:34] Speaker A: Dude, that has to be nuts. Like, having a baby is pretty difficult when you're young, but then having two. I've told you before, your wife has to be incredible.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: Oh, she's insane. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Yep.
[00:40:46] Speaker A: I.
[00:40:47] Speaker B: If I was at home all day the way she is, I would lose my mind.
[00:40:50] Speaker C: So that's a good thing. We're wired differently, right?
[00:40:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
[00:40:55] Speaker A: So thermal drones, spray drones. You've helped me, actually, before.
[00:40:59] Speaker C: Before we go there.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: Oh, what do you got?
[00:41:01] Speaker C: So, Madison, you're hunting.
Are you just a whitetail guy, or are you going into other species? Like, you're talking about going out west, man. Like, you should be, you know, getting in some elk, moose, bear, turkeys.
[00:41:13] Speaker A: Like.
[00:41:14] Speaker C: Like, are you gonna.
[00:41:15] Speaker A: You forgot the Port. He has a family and he has children.
[00:41:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:41:19] Speaker A: Leaving for that as well.
[00:41:20] Speaker C: But.
[00:41:21] Speaker B: But we just went out to Illinois and Pa anyways. But anyway. Yeah, no, I hear what you're saying.
Obviously, turkey hunt. Outside of that, no, I have not done any other, like, big game species, you know, grew up, you know, as a big, you know, family tradition, deer hunting. And that's kind of what I got into and got pretty eaten up with it, and that's still kind of where I'm at. That being said, I did have a brother move out to Colorado, and so I've been like, dude, you need to go out and figure out these elk, and I'll be right out there. So part of it, you know, I've known a lot of guys locally there that have gone out and, like, tried to figure a lot of it out themselves. And it takes some five years to kill an elk. And it's like. Like, I don't really, frankly, feel like I have the time to do that.
And so if I've got somebody out there that, you know, sort of can put some of the pieces together and we can get on some stuff a little quicker, I enjoy being out there. We went out and I did some shed hunting a couple years ago. That was a blast. You know, I think I would enjoy it. It's just not something I've tried yet.
[00:42:15] Speaker A: So. So. So you had said 20 miles, and then I almost chuckled because when I was out in the mountains, I was.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: Going to say that was in a week, too. I mean, that probably do that in a day, right?
[00:42:24] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Like, me and Jared were like, you'll look at this mountainside, right? And you'll have an elk, like, right here, and you're like a mile or two away from them. And it's like, okay, we're gonna drop down in here and come around and. And you start walking.
[00:42:37] Speaker B: Didn't have Onx back there, did you?
[00:42:40] Speaker A: Actually, you download like, the.
And you start walking and it is just so flipping far.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:47] Speaker A: And it is fun, but for me, I was getting burnt out fast because I had that huge camera on me and just trying to keep up. It's. It's. It's a whole different style. I could see. See you trumping around out there.
[00:43:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:43:01] Speaker A: Shooting an elk.
[00:43:02] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, everybody tells me I would just love it and that I would, like, not even like whitetail hunting after that. I'm just like, man, I don't know. I. And I think part of that is why I haven't really tried it yet because, like, I'm so tore up with the whitetail stuff that, like, I have a hard time, like, leaving that. Like, I would almost rather go to Kentucky Hunt 1st of September than go out to Colorado to hunt elk, like, extend my whitetail season rather than just.
[00:43:25] Speaker A: Go to Kentucky and hunt. L. I guess they got some big ones.
[00:43:28] Speaker B: Yeah, buddy. Mine killed one there this year. Yeah.
[00:43:30] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: Jeremy. Yeah.
[00:43:31] Speaker A: Huh. How do you get a tag?
[00:43:33] Speaker B: He bought it. Oh, no. It was like they did, like, an auction. And he won the auction on that tag. Yeah.
[00:43:38] Speaker A: Because I put in, it's like, you're better. You. Your chances of you getting a tag, like, winning in that lottery thing. Yeah.
[00:43:47] Speaker B: Slim. Yeah.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: You'll probably get struck by lightning, right?
[00:43:50] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:43:50] Speaker A: I would like to do that, though.
[00:43:52] Speaker C: Yeah. Madison, when you're. When you're out there, you said you're like the bare bones for your hunting setup. Are you filming as well, or are you just, you know, you're there?
[00:44:02] Speaker B: I did this year when I was running my compound for the bulk of the year. I got that opening weekend kill on. On film as well as Illinois. I did my PA you know, all that stuff is on camera. And when I say, you know, on film, I'm basically running my phone. You know, it's not like I'm running any kind of big major setup.
[00:44:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:44:18] Speaker B: But these newer phones, I mean, especially, like, you know, I picked up the new iPhone and the zoom on. That's really good. I mean, it's. I was pretty impressed with what, you know, kind of quality you can get out of those anymore compared to what it used to be.
[00:44:29] Speaker C: So are you publishing content on a channel or is.
[00:44:32] Speaker B: Yeah, my tree stand. No, tree stand. Forestry.
It's on that channel if you want to watch the stuff.
[00:44:37] Speaker C: So.
[00:44:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:38] Speaker C: Very nice.
[00:44:39] Speaker A: Sweet. I want to talk to you about spray drones.
[00:44:41] Speaker B: Let's talk about it.
[00:44:42] Speaker A: We. You ran with me first season, right? Or no?
[00:44:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: In. In Indiana.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: Indiana.
[00:44:48] Speaker A: On that crummy. Oh, yeah, you did. I remember this now. Okay. Had a crappy trailer. We had to unload our drones. Every single time you came out there, you were being a ramrod because you were kind of like, it's like a thermal drone. I told you. I was like, yeah, it's probably going to end bad. But you did well not crashing a drone for a long time.
[00:45:11] Speaker B: Yeah. And that was back when we were running two drones a piece, too.
[00:45:15] Speaker A: It was.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: Two T40s. And they.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: Chaos. Oh, they sucked. Oh, my gosh. Like, we didn't know how Bad. We had it back then.
[00:45:24] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:45:25] Speaker B: No, that first year was, I think, I think I was out there just over a week or Right. At a week or something. And that was.
I, like, I look back, I've done a lot of things in my life. Like I can remember, like taking a bus from Thailand to Vietnam and, you know, crammed and can't sleep for like 24 hours.
I think I was more stressed that week of flying those T40s. That was one of the more stressful weeks of my life.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: Yeah. We did stick you with a brand new guy too. He had no drone experience.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it was pretty rough. Yeah.
[00:45:56] Speaker A: That was brutal. And didn't quite have to go get her attitude like we do.
[00:46:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, that's fine. It's just, it just makes it, you know, more difficult because it felt like I was, you know, having to watch four drones instead of two. I mean, that wasn't really the reality, but it was like you had that in the back of your head constantly. You couldn't just focus on yours. You had to be aware of which you still need to be aware of everything around you, but you couldn't. And even now, like, you know, sometimes when, you know, we're working together and we're just each flying a T60 this past year is like watching two, I'm just like, man, no wonder I was stressed. It's like that was, that was a lot.
[00:46:30] Speaker A: Yep. How much different are the 60s compared to the 40?
[00:46:34] Speaker B: Oh, they're, you know, you think just two iterations is like night and day. I mean, it's wild.
[00:46:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: I would say the 40s to the 50s was an upgrade for sure. Like a big upgrade. But like from the 40s to the 60s is just wild.
[00:46:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: Like, I mean, they're so good. I haven't even got a chance to fly the hundreds yet. And you. I, from what I've been told, it's. It's an. Another jump.
[00:46:57] Speaker A: So. So the hundred, to me, the jump is just improved camera and improved connectivity. Outside of that, not a huge difference.
[00:47:08] Speaker B: Better than the 60 yet as far as connectivity.
[00:47:10] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:47:11] Speaker B: Really?
[00:47:12] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:47:12] Speaker B: I thought that was the biggest improvement, you know, like, because, you know, looking back of the issues that we had with the 40s, a lot of it was dropping connection and then we couldn't run obstacle avoidance at full speed and so we would just have that turned off. And so then you just had braking and so that's just a recipe for disaster because you lose connection and then it breaks and then you're screwed.
[00:47:32] Speaker A: Yep, yep. Because you have to reconnect in order to give it human command of what to do. Exactly.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: That was the only actually, only time I actually wrecked a drone was that now it was some stupid, you know, basically poor communication on my front. It was a small field in the back that I thought I might lose connection in. And, and instead of running, you know, a half tank, I didn't catch him fast enough and he folded all the way up and I was like, I send it, you know, Mike's mentality, look where it got me.
I have put two drones ever down and.
[00:48:07] Speaker A: But you haven't destroyed one.
[00:48:09] Speaker B: No. Never had to replace anything on any of them.
They both of them was able to clean the corn out around them, take them back off, keep flying.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: Nice. Yep.
[00:48:17] Speaker B: So got pretty fortunate on that.
[00:48:19] Speaker C: So. Yeah, I'd say so.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: So I don't know where the T100 is going to land for sure because you know, we haven't run it a lot. The only running that I did was just some testing stuff. But you mentioned about the obstacle avoidance. We had to turn it off on the T40 because it wouldn't process it fast enough.
I think that the T100 may be like that in scenarios because it's running so fast. You're flying 45 miles an hour like it' double the speed of what a T40 or T50 would be. And I just. The brain needs to process it so fast.
[00:48:55] Speaker B: Right.
[00:48:56] Speaker A: I don't know that it's going to be perfect for all scenarios. Interesting. Most flat land won't have a larger areas y but if you're going to get into really gnarly rolling hills and trying to fly at max four speed, it's probably not.
[00:49:11] Speaker B: Do you, do you see a scenario in which you, you have a T4 T100 and maybe a T60 on the same trailer and you use the T60 for the more small cut up stuff and run the 100 on the big, big stuff or not?
[00:49:22] Speaker A: No, no, I just, just slow your T100 down. Okay.
Slower than the T100. Yeah.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: So you're saying you can just back all the speed, run less liquid in the tank and you're fine?
[00:49:34] Speaker A: Yep, gotcha. To me, what I'm seeing right now is the T100 is probably in a 20 gallon drone all day long, meaning fill it to 20 gallons and not have a big issue. It's a 26 gallon tank, but technically I don't.
[00:49:48] Speaker B: Dude, I don't care. 20 gallons?
[00:49:50] Speaker A: Oh yeah.
[00:49:51] Speaker B: Crazy.
[00:49:51] Speaker A: It's double what you and I were Doing.
[00:49:54] Speaker B: Yeah, we were doing so much 10 gallon work even in the T60 just because a lot of the runs made more sense to do that.
[00:50:02] Speaker A: Yep. But people have to understand when we, when we're saying that we're ferrying a long way compared to what most people do in the spraying industry. Like there's times that I was ferrying consistently 2,000ft to get to the field, to start the field.
[00:50:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:18] Speaker A: So when you're carrying that load with you.
[00:50:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that just kills.
[00:50:21] Speaker A: Yeah, just absolutely kills the battery. But yeah, I'm excited to see what the T100 will do. You, you talked about buying your own drone and doing a niche type work kind of with what, what it is that you do.
Do you think see that happening or are you kind of moved on with that and you'll just recommend.
[00:50:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I probably won't.
You know, there's some, some pretty unique applications in the forestry side of things. You know, again, I work with a lot of hunters. We have the food plot side.
You know, the, the more interesting thing that I see are, for instance, out in Illinois or western Ohio on the honeysuckle, the, the properties that have a lot of honeysuckle. There's a tiny little window in the first of November to where the honeysuckle is still alive and the timber is dormant. And so you're able to just basically spray over the timber, kill off that honeysuckle and not affect your woods.
[00:51:19] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:51:20] Speaker B: So it's a super unique.
[00:51:21] Speaker A: I mean, you've seen this done.
[00:51:23] Speaker B: It is being done currently out in Illinois. A lot of guys are using it with helicopters, but I'm sure it would work fine with drones.
[00:51:29] Speaker A: That is interesting.
[00:51:30] Speaker B: And so I'm sure your application rate would have to be pretty high to be able to get it down that far.
[00:51:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:35] Speaker B: But you know, it's stuff like that that intrigues me. You know, for instance, southern Ohio, we deal a lot with multiflower rose.
I'm trying to, you know, like this spring I'm really going to keep an eye on is there a window there where that multiflower rose is green but everything else is still dormant? Like, and you know, even that stuff out in Illinois they're saying there's, you know, one out of three years that you won't be able to get it done because the trees are staying, you know, alive later in the year. And so, you know, everything's timing, there's a really tight window there.
But you know, if that would be possible, like for instance, the main farm that I hunt, it was a little bit mismanaged. On the timber prior. And so there's you know, seas of this multiflower roads were you know, uninhabitable by deer even. And so it's really tough to get that stuff killed without chemical even running fire through it is just kind of a temporary thing. It just keeps coming back. So you really need to kill it with chemical and then burn it. And to even get to most of it, you can't like it's. It's 50 yards in there, you know, of the stuff. And so how do you get to it? And it's too steep for a mulching drum. You know, it's just a lot of options.
[00:52:39] Speaker A: Sounds like you need to do some testing. We'll, we'll give you a 60 or a 50.
[00:52:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's kind of, you know, with the multi spectral, you know, I was thinking you could go in on the spring, scan it, you know, pick out the green pockets. And on this particular piece it was cut hard enough to where there's large areas open like within the timber, like blocks. Even if you could just get that stuff taken care of and then from there, you know, do it manually and you know, have it something that takes maybe even a couple years to get under control, that's fine. It's just, it's such a daunting task even for freaking 50 acres. It's just like, I mean for guys that have hundred, you know, multi, hundred acre farms, it's. It is so overwhelming that it never gets done. And those are some of the biggest challenges that we're finding in the industry today is past mismanagement of the forest and then, you know, and it's no fault to the landowners because I get it, they don't want to do the work on the invasive side of things because you know, whenever you do a harvest, whether it's, you know, you know, in a perfect scenario, but you go before a harvest, you go in and you would take care of all the invasives and then you do your harvest and then as you know, any invasives come back, you take care of and manage them as they come back. That's a ton of work.
[00:53:52] Speaker A: I was gonna say like can you ever get to the point, say there's invasive in there, honeysuckle. Can you ever get to the point where.
[00:53:59] Speaker B: No, no, I don't think you'll ever get to where it's perfect. I don't think you'll never have like just none of it. You can make huge strides and you know, for, and the reason you would do it even to begin with is like I mentioned earlier that that buddy of mine has that property was 50 acres or 30 some acres of like solid invasives. Not a deer in it.
Yeah, that's brutal. And so, you know, the deer don't want to be in that stuff. And so if you can go in and at least remove pockets, I mean, because there are scenarios that's the only cover you have. You don't want to remove all of it. Yeah, but you know, the biggest problem that we're encountering right now in the industry, or one of the bigger problems is, is dealing with invasives. And again, you know, like I said, it's no fault of the landowners because it's so much work and the cost of hiring somebody to come and do that for you really eats into any profit you'd be making off the timber. And so it just, it's a hard sell. And so you end up having a lot of properties that don't get anything done with it. Whereas if you could figure out something with the drones, even if it's a very selective herbicide to where you can spray, you know, timber, and I probably. It's gonna be impossible to do that, you know, given trying to spray something like a multiflower rose that's woody in timber. I don't know if that's even possible. But like, somebody could invent, you know, some kind of selective herbicide there. That'd be amazing.
[00:55:10] Speaker A: Yeah, so I'm not into that, but hearing you talk about it, I'm like, yeah, that sounds like a pain in the neck to try to keep up with it is.
[00:55:20] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, big time.
[00:55:22] Speaker C: So outside of the, the hunting space and, or if you're gonna, you know, take timber off, what is the actual benefit of getting rid of these invasives? What's the incentive you're going to be.
[00:55:31] Speaker B: You know, again, it's invasive. So a lot of the native plants are suffering because of these invasives coming in.
[00:55:38] Speaker A: So they're most like oak trees wouldn't be able to grow there because possibly.
[00:55:42] Speaker B: It depends on what stage and everything what ends up happening is these invasives are so shade tolerant and so they're able to flourish underneath full canopy. And so then they become your second story or they, they basically create a smother almost without allowing your native browse and stuff to be able to grow underneath that on the forest floor. And so, you know, if you can remove that, you're just. The whole ecosystem is better because of it.
And you're right, somebody that doesn't have a true hunting motive May struggle to see the benefits of spending the money on that and probably won't. But for somebody that's in the property management space or there's a lot of guys that they buy this land, they want to make it better. And those are some of the main things that you can do to make a property better. And, you know, if we can get. Get to a point to where some of these drones are, I mean, they're already being utilized in the space, but, yeah, even more so, I think that's.
[00:56:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that's something that could be pretty incredible. Down south, they do a lot of timber work, but I think they're cuts. Yeah, that's completely different.
[00:56:48] Speaker B: Yeah. So what they're. A lot of that is doing after a clear cut, they'll go in, spray out the entire area, and then replant.
[00:56:54] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:56:54] Speaker B: And so that gives you kind of a window there where everything else is.
Everything else is dead and gives the chance for the new replants to be able to grow, selective harvest a little bit different.
[00:57:05] Speaker A: So interesting.
[00:57:06] Speaker C: So what I'm hearing is that outside of the outdoorsman that's hunting, there's. There's a small.
There's a small incentive for somebody to improve the land. So if they're. If they don't care about the local ecosystem, the local flora, fauna, stuff like that, a lot of people, there's not.
There's not enough return for them to spend the money to actually go in and take care of the invasives outside of. If they're gonna flip the property for an outdoorsman and they want a better price point.
[00:57:36] Speaker B: Right.
[00:57:36] Speaker C: But they really have to care about.
[00:57:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And even that, frankly, it's. It's sad because it doesn't really affect the price of land that much. Like, not enough that'd be worth messing with.
[00:57:45] Speaker C: Right.
[00:57:46] Speaker B: You know, one thing, you know, there. There are some programs with the state that basically some cost sharing on some of that to where you can potentially get, you know, a plan written up by a forester and then have, you know, basically get funds from the state to be able to get some of that stuff done. You know, that the body that was down in Athens, he had that done, and basically, you know, got written a pretty sizable amount of money to be able to take care of that, and that was flat enough. They could. Basically, what they did in that scenario, they brought a mulching head on a skid steer and, you know, mowed it all down, sprayed it, and that's a very effective way of taking care of in a scenario like that. A lot of spots that I'm talking about are so rugged you can't. There's no way to do that.
[00:58:26] Speaker A: Yeah, that's good. How's somebody get a hold of you if they.
[00:58:29] Speaker B: Yeah, reach out. Treesandforestry.com is the best place to reach me. There's a contact me form. If you go on that. Fill that form out and yeah, be back in touch with you. I do. Like I said, I do, you know, timber harvest here in most of Ohio. The southwest corner, basically two hours from Tuscaroras county is kind of my bubble. And then I've heard you go to.
[00:58:50] Speaker A: Illinois though, weren't you? Yeah.
[00:58:52] Speaker B: So yeah, I do some appraisals and like attack timber tax basis. Not going to go into what that is. You can look that up on my channel. But I do some of those outside of, you know, Ohio here and I do offer some services in other states. But if you want a full on timber harvest done that is, you know, within two hours of Ohio of where I'm at here. So social platforms, frankly I'm not, I mean I have them, don't really post on them. I'm not really on Instagram, Facebook, anything like that. It's basically YouTube, so.
[00:59:20] Speaker A: Cool. Alrighty. Well, thanks for coming and sharing.
[00:59:23] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:59:24] Speaker A: All right.
[00:59:24] Speaker B: It was good working with you.
[00:59:25] Speaker A: Until next time.
