Jan. 22, 2014

By Rumasa Noor

Most people in the business world know that the best business idea is the one that proposes the solution to a problem. This is what UW-Whitewater Sophomore Mitchell Fiene did when he saw problems in the farming field.
Fiene has modified a helicopter into a quadcopter, a machine with a camera that flies around in a field with a camera attached and takes photos of crops.
AIMQ, which stands for aerial intelligence modified quadcopter, has four blades, which helps with the machine’s movement.

“With four motors and redundancy you can fly around extremely stable, hover, take pictures of corns, soybeans or whatever you are looking at,” Fiene said. “We do several different modifications to them in order to make them more viable in agriculture.”

Before AIMQ, an Unmanned Aeriel Vehicle, was created, Fiene and his cousin, Zach Fiene, worked for a company named Winfield Solutions. As a part of their job, they had to walk around in fields for hours to take samples of plant diseases. As they were doing their jobs, they realized that there had to be a quicker, more efficient way to do it. Fiene and his cousin started flying helicopters with cameras on them and sent the samples to Fiene’s dad, who is now the business manager for their company.
Beginning of DMZ Aerial
Fiene’s invention soon became a hit in the agricultural industry.
“Customers started asking how we were getting these really great images, making these diagnoses, and asking us to come out and show them what we are doing,” Fiene said.
Fiene said he started out as a small marketing firm, and originally planned to build a website for promotional material for agricultural businesses.
Fiene said technology is not a huge part of agricultural businesses, which is why they felt the need to build a marketing firm.
“They were starting to realize how important some of the technology was becoming,” Fiene said. “We noticed we were getting a lot more tech questions than marketing questions or anything like that so our business kind of took up from there.”
Because of this new trend in the agricultural industry, Mitchell and Zach Fiene formed their corporation, DMZ Aerial, in June 2012.
Fiene said he has been getting positive feedback on DMZ Aeriel. The company also manufactures and sells yield link, a data management system, a bio stimulant, similar to a fertilizer and Unmanned Aeriel Vehicles.
Fiene’s company also uses the new technology to enhance its products.
“A recent innovation would be a type of camera that’s called an NDVI camera, and it uses infrared spectrum of light, and we can actually look at vegetation, so basically it sees what we can’t see,” Fiene said.

Future Ambitions
Fiene’s main goal with DMZ Aerial is to continue to expand.
One way Fiene is already expanding the business is by offering training to the co-operatives so they can train their interns to use the technology, and help other companies implement their own scouting platforms into their business.
“This summer we will be able to employ a few people to go out and scout for our current customers who just need help with getting caught up with scouting during the year,” Fiene said. “We are going to have a  have a 10 week program this  summer for aerial crops scouting to help customers learn how to do it, so by 2015 they can do it themselves.”

New Technology
DMZ Aerial now has customers in 15 states, as well as in Canada. They sell their products mostly to independent retailers, so they can resell them to their customers.
“Because of the FAA regulations with the UAVs, we currently just sell the units, we sell UAVs and offer services and training,” Fiene said. By 2015, our customers can start offering and charging for scouting services. “For yield link, we sell the units, and we also offer subscription to our data once we are able to analyze the data to combine.”
Fiene is majoring in entrepreneurship at UW-Whitewater along with maintaining his business with Zach.He also mentioned that he get to use the skills that he learns in school.
“Its important for me to do both,” Fiene said. I usually work in the morning so I am able to answer phone calls. Zach works full time, so we try and get caught up with most of the work during the day.
Fiene spent most of his time during winter break planning for the next year’s growing season, and during summer he spends his time meeting old customers and new customers and implementing his business strategy.
“The plan is to grow out each one of these products a little bit separately,” Fiene said.