Executive Summary

Through most of Guyana's modern history, agriculture was the load-bearing wall of the economy. Rice paid for development. Sugar built communities. Cattle, fish, and ground provisions kept the country fed when commodity markets turned against export earnings. Less than a decade has been enough to flip that arrangement on its head. Offshore crude began flowing at the end of 2019, and by 2025 agriculture's share of total GDP had fallen to roughly 7.7% against a long-run average closer to 25%.

This matters because the things farmers actually need — affordable fertilizer, working drainage, current information about what is happening in their fields, and tools that move yields rather than reports about them — tend to be the first items underfunded when a sector loses centre stage.

Tech4Agri is SRI's response to that gap. We deliver drone services on a per-hectare basis: multispectral surveys that show what is actually happening across a field, GIS maps that translate the imagery into something an agronomist or estate manager can act on, and precision foliar spraying for both agro-chemicals and the Nano Urea recently brought into Guyana by the Ministry of Agriculture. This paper sets out three things: why we built the service, how it actually runs from contract to deliverable, and what would have to change for the same service to operate across all ten administrative regions rather than only on the coast.

Section 1Why We Built Tech4Agri

1.1 Agriculture's reversal of fortune

Through most of Guyana's modern economic history, agriculture was the largest single contributor to GDP. Rice, sugar, and livestock between them produced the bulk of export earnings, rural employment, and government revenue.

Less than a decade has been enough to turn that arrangement upside down. Offshore crude began flowing at the end of 2019, and by 2024 production had crossed several hundred thousand barrels a day. Agriculture's contribution to total GDP fell to roughly 8% in 2024 and to about 7.7% in 2025. None of this means farms have failed; rice production set a national record of 1.14 million tonnes in 2025, and non-oil GDP figures still place agriculture, forestry, and fishing at over 23 percent of the non-oil economy.

Sector budget allocations have climbed in nominal terms, from around US$87.6 million in 2020 to US$464.8 million in 2024, but much of the additional money has gone into drainage rehabilitation, road construction, and post-flood recovery. Less of it has reached the per-hectare economics that decide whether a rice farmer in Region 5 plants the next crop.

1.2 The fertilizer squeeze

Nothing makes the gap between national-level ambition and farm-level reality more concrete than fertilizer. Nitrogen costs have been climbing for several years, pushed up by global energy prices, container-shipping disruptions, and exchange-rate pressure on imported agro-chemicals. When the Ministry consulted more than 550 farmers across coastal and hinterland regions, high input costs came back as one of the loudest complaints.

Direct fertilizer allocations to farmers totalled roughly G$1.85 billion across 2022, 2023 and 2024, with another G$2 billion lined up for 2025. The relief is real. The structure of the problem, however, sits beneath what subsidies can reach. Most farms broadcast granular urea by hand or by tractor spreader — a method that wastes a meaningful share of every kilogram applied.

1.3 Where drones, and Nano Urea, change the equation

Two routes exist to bring a farmer's fertilizer cost down without changing the price tag on the bag. The first is using the same product more carefully. The second is choosing a formulation that gets the same nitrogen into the plant from a smaller per-hectare dose. Combine the two and the savings stack.

The Ministry of Agriculture has already moved on the second route by bringing Nano Urea into the country — a liquid nitrogen fertilizer formulated as nanoparticles small enough to be absorbed directly through the leaf surface. A small foliar dose can substitute for a much larger ground broadcast, with significant cuts in runoff and groundwater contamination as a side effect.

Aerial drones were built for this. The nozzles produce the right droplet size, the rotor wash drives the mist into the canopy, the rate is controlled by software, and a single machine covers in an afternoon what would take a crew most of a week to work through on foot.

1.4 The productivity gap, in concrete terms

Three patterns we kept seeing at the farm level pushed us to build Tech4Agri:

• Yield variability inside the same field. Across most holdings we have flown, somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of the planted area is producing less than the field average — usually due to drainage, soil structure, or pest pockets invisible from ground level.
• Fertilizer waste in broadcast application. Drone-applied foliar Nano Urea, timed correctly, can shave the per-hectare nitrogen footprint by a third or more without giving up yield.
• Climate volatility and water stress. The 2023–2024 El Niño held parts of the country in dry conditions for the better part of a year. Farms running aerial surveys flagged the issue early. The rest of the sector found out at harvest.

1.5 Why a service, and not equipment sales

A capable agricultural drone fitted with multispectral imaging, RTK positioning, and a 30-litre spray tank lands somewhere between US$15,000 and US$35,000. Once you add a pilot, maintenance, batteries, a GIS analyst, and regulatory paperwork, that figure roughly doubles in the first year alone.

Most farms do not need a drone every day. They need one heavily for a fortnight before planting, again at peak crop stress, and across narrow weather windows when sprays go on. A service model where SRI brings the drone, the pilot, and the data pipeline only when the farm actually needs them turns a capital outlay into a variable operating cost.

Section 2How the Service Model Works

Tech4Agri runs as a set of connected service lines that a farm can buy individually or together. Survey work is priced per hectare. Spray work is also priced per hectare. GIS pipeline build-outs and operator training are quoted as projects.

2.1 The service lines

2.2 Nano Urea, applied properly

Three variables decide whether Nano Urea actually delivers at the farm gate:

• Timing. Foliar nitrogen has its strongest effect during particular phenological stages. For paddy rice, that means tillering and panicle initiation. Applied outside those windows, the response curve flattens.
• Droplet size and coverage. A knapsack sprayer cannot produce droplets of the size Nano Urea wants. Drone nozzles deliver droplets in the right range, and rotor wash pushes the mist down into the canopy.
• Field conditions on the day. Wind speed, leaf wetness, and ambient temperature all influence uptake. A drone operator running a flight plan with on-site weather checks can adjust. A casual contractor usually cannot.

2.3 A typical engagement

Phase 1. Baseline survey

We fly the entire farm over one or two days using multispectral cameras. The output is a high-resolution map of vegetation health, soil-moisture proxies, and drainage anomalies, paired with a short written report flagging priority zones.

Phase 2. Targeted intervention

Where the survey throws up problems the farm wants to act on, we bring spray drones in for precision application or pass the data to the farm's own team. Sprays are scheduled around weather windows and label-rate constraints.

Phase 3. Repeat monitoring

Farms on a full-season contract get re-flown at fixed intervals — pre-planting, mid-season, and pre-harvest. Each flight is comparable to the previous one, building a multi-season dataset useful for rotation, land allocation, and infrastructure investment decisions.

2.4 What the farmer sees

• Maps and reports come in PDF and printable formats as well as raw data files. A field manager can carry the printed zoning map into the paddock and act on it the same morning.
• Recommendations are phrased operationally: "clean the drains running through the eastern third of this field before next planting" — not "NDVI values in zone 3B suggest reduced canopy density."
• Pricing is per hectare and quoted before any flight. No subscriptions and no minimum acreage clauses.

Section 3The Economics, Honestly

Drone services are not the right answer for every operation. Farms below roughly 20 hectares running simple cropping patterns usually do not generate enough savings to recover the cost. Above that scale, the arithmetic begins to favour engagement.

3.1 Where the value sits

3.2 Where the value does not sit

• A drone does not fix a blocked drain. It locates the blocked drain.
• Drones do not stand in for agronomists. The maps are inputs into a decision. The decision sits with the farm.
• Spray drones are not a replacement for integrated pest management; they are a better way of delivering whatever IPM programme the farm is already running.
• On very small or fragmented holdings, aggregation through cooperatives or extension-led clusters is how the economics get solved.

3.3 Indicative cost stack

Section 4What It Would Take to Scale Nationally

Tech4Agri runs at pilot scale today, concentrated on coastal Regions. Extending the service across all ten administrative Regions is achievable inside three growing seasons. It depends on four conditions falling into place.

4.1 Treating fertilizer cost as a national problem

Drone-applied Nano Urea could plausibly substitute for a quarter of the conventional urea currently broadcast across Guyana's rice acreage. The foreign-exchange savings on fertilizer imports, the cut in nitrogen runoff, and the per-farm margin gain together make the case for a coordinated programme stronger than any individual farm contract can support.

4.2 Trained Guyanese operators and analysts

A national service needs between 60 and 80 certified drone operators alongside 15 to 20 GIS analysts. Partnerships with the Guyana School of Agriculture and technical institutes in Berbice and Essequibo will produce the certified operator pool faster than any single provider working alone.

4.3 Regulatory clarity

Commercial drone work needs a stable framework covering pilot certification, airworthiness, flight authorisations, and chemical-application rules. Foliar fertilizer application by drone sits between aviation regulation and pesticide regulation. Clarity on which framework applies would speed adoption noticeably.

4.4 Connectivity, base infrastructure, and aggregation

Drone services rely on reliable battery charging, gigabytes of imagery storage, and enough connectivity to deliver analysis within 48 hours. A scaled service needs regional bases, most logically co-located with existing extension offices or NAREI substations. SRI's sister line, KV Energies, can deliver the solar and storage component.

4.5 A three-year rollout

Section 5Working with SRI

For agribusiness managers

The first engagement that tells you the most is a baseline multispectral survey across one or two representative fields, paired with a short Nano Urea trial on a defined block. Run that combination once and you will know inside a single growth cycle whether precision application reduces your fertilizer bill enough to justify extending it.

For policy planners and sector agencies

The most useful first step is a pilot built around a specific policy outcome — a Nano Urea demonstration on rice, extending non-traditional crop coverage, or quantifying drainage gains across a defined coastal stretch. We work with NAREI, GLDA, GRDB and other sector agencies on a project basis.

For cooperatives and farmer associations

Aggregation is what brings precision application within reach for small and mid-size producers. We schedule cluster spray days, build shared monitoring records, and structure pricing so individual smallholders pay the same per-hectare rate as large estates.