Lumipad
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Build drones.
Earn a living.

Training drone pilots in Mindanao with drones they built themselves.

A do-it-yourself drone training program for rural Filipino farmers and micro-entrepreneurs — equipping graduates with the skills, parts, and a working aircraft to launch their own crop-survey business.

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Tuition, parts and drone included No experience needed Open plans, free to share

We train, they build, everyone shares.

  • We train entrepreneurs to fly.

    Rural community members enroll in a six-week program and graduate as certified drone pilots — ready to launch their own microenterprise offering crop-health surveys to nearby farms and cooperatives.

  • They build the drones themselves.

    Every aircraft is hand-assembled in our Davao workshop using parts sourced inside the Philippines — locally-cut frames, off-the-shelf components. No proprietary kit, no import dependency.

  • All of it is open.

    Plans, parts lists, wiring diagrams, and the full six-week curriculum — everything we develop is published free under Creative Commons, in English, Tagalog and Cebuano.

Lumipad trainee building a drone in the Davao workshop

A program, a kit, and a business — all in one.

Locals enroll. They learn on drone simulators and on real airframes. They graduate with a working drone, a service playbook, and ongoing support — ready to charge nearby farms for crop-health surveys.

1

Enroll

Community members from rural farming barangays sign up for a free, full-cohort training program — no prior electronics background required.

2

Train

Hands-on workshops with drone simulators, soldering irons, and full assembly of a working quadcopter — taught with our open documentation library.

3

Graduate and fly

Every graduate leaves with a fully assembled, calibrated drone and the qualification to operate it for survey work in their region — as well as financial support for drone pilot certification.

4

Earn

Graduates run their own micro-business: drone surveys, NDVI imagery, plant counts and field reports for nearby growers, agribusinesses and co-ops.

We fill a critical gap in drones for agriculture.

Agricultural drones don't reach the farmers who need them. The smallest commercial agri-drone setup costs tens of thousands of dollars and demands a specialist pilot. For a smallholder cacao farmer in Davao, that's not a tool — it's an impossibility.

Drone surveying agricultural farmland

Drones are too expensive.

A DJI Agras-class setup with the sensors needed for crop-health work starts in the tens of thousands. For a smallholder cacao farmer in Davao, that's not a tool — it's an impossibility.

Progress is too slow.

When the equipment is too expensive to risk, no one new gets trained. Coverage stays narrow, the bottleneck never opens, and farms wait weeks between surveys.

Knowledge is siloed.

Hobbyist tutorials are half-finished and assume access to parts and shops that simply don't exist in rural Southeast Asia.

We close all three gaps at once — inexpensive, home-built drones with local parts, a training program that creates new pilots, and an open library that turns scattered tutorials into a clear path.

Apply now

Kennemer Foods International

Kennemer Foods — cacao farming in Mindanao Kennemer Foods · Mindanao

Kennemer Foods International is a Philippine agribusiness supporting smallholder farmers across cacao, coffee and coconut value chains — from planting materials and training, through to market access.

Kennemer is one of Lumipad's key partners in Mindanao. Their cooperative network across the Davao region connects us with the farming communities who benefit most from affordable drone surveys — and their deep relationships with smallholder farmers helped shape how we designed the training program.

Together, we're putting drone-powered crop survey data into the hands of the people who work the land — supporting Kennemer's cacao-preneur initiative and helping farmers meet new EU deforestation regulations (EUDR). Every drone in the field is one more data point keeping a farmer connected to global markets.

Visit Kennemer

Proudly in the Philippines.
Proudly Filipino.

Flag of the Philippines
  • Designed for community organisations, agri-cooperatives, NGOs and educators
  • Cohorts run quarterly
  • No tuition — your time is the contribution

There's a workbench waiting for you.

Our next cohort opens in September 2026 in Mindanao. We accept community members, agri-cooperative staff, and partner-org trainees from across Mindanao, Visayas and Palawan. No prior experience with electronics or flying is required — just show up ready to learn and build.

100% FreeTuition, training, parts and a working drone — all included for every qualified participant.
Apply now About Lumipad

What you get when you join.

  • 1Six weeks of hands-on training with drone simulators, soldering, and full flight school.
  • 2A fully assembled, calibrated Lumipad Quad — yours to keep, fly and earn with.
  • 3Lifetime access to the parts library, repair help, and the Lumipad pilot community.
  • 4A starter business kit: pricing, contracts, and intros to nearby cooperatives.
  • 5Free, lifetime access to the Lumipad platform and mobile app — tree counts, NDVI imagery, pest detection and yield estimates for every survey you fly.