This week’s news round up looks at the public perception of drone deliveries in Ireland, and two distinct ways that drones are benefitting agriculture through protection and aerial intelligence.

Ireland Resident Complain of Noise from Drone Deliveries

After much success with their drone delivery services, Manna aims to expand their program to reach more customers. Despite the immense customer base, the community has voiced a lot of complaints from the community about the noise resulting from each delivery. The Irish government is taking steps to regulate commercial drone activity before it becomes a normal operation in their day-to-day lives. To that end, the government proposed a bill for a national drone policy that will define the rules for when and how drones are used. The bill would also enable citizens to take drone companies to court over noise complaints. Overall, the government is worried that more drone delivery companies could pop up, increasing the noise and busying the skies without any regulation.

Drones Manage Bird-Related Issues for Australian Horticulture

Australian crop growers continue to face challenges with birds affecting their crops. A partnership between AERIUM Analytics and Hort Innovation has brought a three-year long project to help eradicate this problem humanely. They plan to test both fixed-wing and flapping wing drones across the high-value crop fields in Australia. The goal is to address the persistent damage birds cause to the crops by establishing a predatory presence with the drones to fend them off. Over time, this will shape the  birds’ behavior to keep them away for good. The project combines AERIUM's drone technology and wildlife management expertise with Hort Innovation's agricultural research leadership to deliver practical, scalable, and wildlife-safe solutions that can integrate seamlessly into daily farm operations and improve productivity across Australia's horticulture industry.

SiFly & Taranis Partner to Advancer Aerial Crop Intelligence

In other agricultural news, SiFly Aviation and Taranis have partnered to launch a 2026 Field Validation Program to test a new operational model for large-scale agricultural crop monitoring. This operation will combine SiFly’s Q12 autonomous drone and Taranis’s AI-powered crop intelligence platform. The drone is equipped with 3 hours of flight time and advanced sensor capabilities to answer the question of whether extended flight times can improve efficiency, data consistency, and scalability across large farming areas. Overall, the goal of this program is to address the challenge of collecting high-quality agricultural data at scale. The expected outcomes would show that longer flight times have a direct impact on more ground covered, reducing operational friction, and fundamentally changing the economics of aerial data collection for farms, cooperatives, and agricultural retailers.