By Robert L. Smith, The Plain Dealer

AKRON, Ohio–Drinking in the scene as you drive through Ohio farm country these days, you might guess that the corn is about as high as an elephant’s eye, as the oldsong goes.

Farmers, it turns out, need a surer assessment of the height and the health of their crops. Unseen pests and weeds can hobble those racing rows of corn. It’s not easy to inspect hundreds of acres of soybeans near the full bloom of harvest.

Jeff Taylor, a 27-year old rocket scientist with a passion for unmanned aircraft, is offering farmers a new, bird’s eye view. His Akron startup, Event 38 Unmanned Systems, is bringing drone technology to the farm belt –and maybe giving Ohio an edge in a blossoming industry.

Taylor’s pilotless, miniature airplanes–which snap high-resolution photos of crops, cattle, soil and much else that farmers worry about–are selling about as fast as he can make them.

Brisk online sales hint at a market ready to mushroom. The company is selling 15 to 20 drones a month, with about half going abroad, Taylor said.

Drones remain a little outlaw, as inventors and entrepreneurs wait for the Federal Aviation Administration to write the rules of the game. But most experts agree a new industry is dawning fast.  As it pioneers a niche, Event 38 is expecting to soar.

John Blair, a seasoned entrepreneur from San Francisco, recently joined the two-year-old company as second in command. He’s assembling an executive team and looking for capital to build out the technology platform.

Meanwhile, the company is working with Ohio State University’s Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster, refining the art of crop scouting.

And Taylor, an aerospace engineering graduate of Case Western Reserve University, is nearing his dream of seeing drones put to useful, even essential use.

He’s been tinkering with flying machines for years, building better, cheaper and more helpful drones as fellow hobbyists were content to race them through the air, he says.

“I thought, ‘Man, I’ve got to get this out there,” he said of his work. “These things could be useful to a lot of people.”

One of his first jobs, with spacecraft maker SpaceX in California, gave him the company name. His part of a space flight project had the dramatic title Event 38.

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