In the race for farm-to-table freshness, Albert Boyce is betting nothing can beat the Mill House restaurant’s claim: delivering produce from field to fork in as little as 10 minutes.

That’s with the help of a 25-by-18-inch, 14-pound partner — a $4,500, battery-operated DJI Spreading Wings S900 drone equipped with a camera and wire basket.

The Mill House is at Maui Tropical Plantation in Waikapu, a 59-acre visitor attraction that includes zip lines, tram tours and an exhibit of a vintage locomotive. It also includes farmland, leased to Kumu Farms and Hoaloha Farms. Boyce, managing partner/owner of the site, is excited about its latest innovation.

Drones, also known as UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), have been generating a lot of buzz lately in the agriculture industry. A growing number of farmers worldwide are using maps, data, videos and high-resolution photos created by drones to improve production quality and quantity. Equipped with state-of-the-art sensors and cameras, those small flying machines can pinpoint disease, erosion, irrigation leaks, pest infestation and crop irregularities that would be difficult to detect on the ground.

The use of drones for agricultural purposes hasn’t become widespread in Hawaii yet, and Boyce is thrilled to be at the forefront of that new technology.

“We believe we’re the only business in the world right now that’s transporting just-harvested crops directly to a restaurant with a drone,” he said. “Our drone can carry produce from our farthest fields half a mile away to a portable landing pad 30 feet from the Mill House’s kitchen in a few minutes.”

So far the drone’s “cargo” has included kale, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, pineapples, bananas, taro and macadamia nuts. Initially, Boyce was thinking about buying European-style foraging bikes for transport purposes, but he soon realized they wouldn’t work well in rainy weather when the plantation’s dirt roads turn to mud.

In September he was looking at scenic aerial footage of the property that Chris Norberg, an avid drone hobbyist who handles Mill House’s online marketing, shot for fun.

“I had an ‘aha’ moment!” Boyce said. “Why couldn’t we use a drone to reduce our carbon footprint and transport produce for each meal service as needed? We usually harvest in bulk. The drone could bring freshly harvested produce in small amounts to the Mill House throughout the day. That would cut our spoilage and costs to operate an off-road vehicle.”

With a fully charged battery and a load of produce in its wire basket (7 pounds seems to be the optimum), the drone can fly for about 12 minutes. A round trip, with the field-based pilot having line-of-sight vision the whole way, takes about five minutes. The battery is rechargeable, but four spares are kept on hand so there’s no downtime.

The drone flies no higher than 100 feet, solely on plantation property and never over people or animals, so it’s operating legally for recreational use (the FAA’s height limit for recreational UAVs is 400 feet).

“Our experimental runs over the past month overcame all of our doubts and exceeded all of our expectations,” Boyce said. “We’ve proven that the drone is a viable delivery option, and that success has allowed us to start thinking about how we can standardize the process for efficiency.”

By January, Boyce hopes to install “waypoint” GPS software, which will enable the plantation’s drone to fly on autopilot. (Right now an experienced drone pilot is needed to steer it, make it reach the correct altitude and land it.) That way, “kitchen workers will be able to do both the harvesting and flying with basic drone training,” he said.

Plans are in the works to program four to eight flights per day from various points in the fields. In addition, the plantation has applied for a Section 333 Exemption of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 so that it may one day offer delivery services to customers off property — akin to what Amazon is aiming to do with its Prime Air, presented in 2013.

Boyce envisions flying produce by drones from a farmers market at the plantation to an area where customers would pick it up. Using drones for deliveries to homes and hotels is another possibility.

“The technology is here,” Boyce said, “and we’re going to be on the cutting edge of it.”