Agricultural and Other Commercial

WASTE WATER, COMPOSTING, LANDFILL

Pest birds at waste management and composting facilities pose obvious health and safety and maintenance concerns. The birds pick over what they want and often carry scraps away to eat outside the site’s perimeters. This results in the scatter of waste debris around the facility and beyond and can create a stressful environment for field operators with pest birds looming, pecking, and fluttering nearby. Gatherings of large numbers of scavenging birds and their droppings are problematic anywhere, serving as they do for the transmission of diseases and impacting site-worker well-being.

Hardshell Labs’ methods of driving pest birds away from these sites yield two other important benefits: keeping pernicious birds away and denying the benefits of the site’s resources to them. By denying these resource giveaways, Hardshell Lab’s methods may ultimately reduce the birds’ reproductive success, leading to a decline in their numbers locally and regionally.

Hardshell Labs is in the field 2022/2023 in southern California for large-scale tests of raven repulsion at a wastewater treatment facility, and an industrial-scale composting site.

AGRICULTURE

Many birds are agricultural pests and the challenge of driving them from crops and orchards is significant. Across America losses from pest bird species stretches well into the billions of dollars annually, and highlights the continuing demand for Hardshell Labs’ techniques for  avian hazing and denial. Field experience indicates that due to raven learning characteristics (they’re smart!) aversion to areas protected by Hardshell Labs is retained by individual birds and may even be passed onto others in their group.

In one agricultural market over 250,000 acres of pistachios are under cultivation in California, generating some 600 million pounds of annual production, representing 99% of U.S. production, second only to Iran on the world market. Losses to ravens cut into the harvest and can exceed 50% on small parcels, and unprotected orchards have been known to be stripped clean. Traditional pest avian aversion approaches have limited effectiveness and can be labor intensive, expensive and polluting. Hardshell has deployed laser and drone-based bird hazing methodologies in pistachio orchards, with very promising results. Learn more on our Pistachio Protection page.

The company is advancing those technologies through the use of Artificial Intelligence. HSL’s technology and approaches could readily be transferred to many other high-value crops including: vineyards, berries and other nuts. Hardshell continually is improving its methods of discouraging pest birds from attacking crops and agricultural infrastructure, and is open to inquiries to protect your crops.

DAIRY OPERATIONS

Dairy operations face obvious pest bird issues similar to other agricultural settings in regards to: their heightened sanitation concerns from droppings; loss of expensive dairy-cow feed to birds’ eating and contamination; general nuisance and health concerns of dairy employees. Dairy owners typically accept and absorb these losses as part of standard dairy operating procedure. Perhaps there is a better way through Hardshell’s technologies and services.

MILITARY and COMMERCIAL AIRPORT BIRD HAZARD PREVENTION (BASH Program)

Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard (BASH) is a serious threat to military, commercial and private aviation. Open spaces near airports, both terrestrial and aquatic, attract birds and thus increase BASH. Hardshell Labs is collaborating with its technology partners to develop a number of creative hazing devices, including an AI assisted laser, and programmable aerial and terrestrial drones, to discourage birds from hanging around airfields. Background info: The Federal Aviation Administration National Wildlife Strike Database, “In 2020, 11,605 strikes were reported. Seventy-four strikes resulted in a destroyed aircraft from 1990-2020; 41 (55%) of these occurred at general aviation airports. The annual cost of wildlife strikes to the USA civil aviation industry in 2020 was projected to be a minimum of 75,861 hours of aircraft downtime and $124 million in direct and other monetary losses. “