What the maps changed, in bushels and in dollars, after the grain was sold.
Two seasons of wall-to-wall fungicide had not touched the loss in their north-east block. We imaged the whole farm every ten days from V4 through R3 and treated only what the maps flagged.
The block was never sick. Thermal imaging found standing water under the canopy in week three, and the answer turned out to be a tile line rather than another tank of chemistry.
Pulled from flight logs and settled harvest data across six seasons of contracts. If a figure cannot be traced to a grower's books, it is not on this page.
Height, overlap, droplet size and timing all shift with what is growing underneath. These are the systems we have logged enough hours in to quote without hedging.
Corn, soy, wheat and cotton at scale, with passes booked against growth stage rather than a date on the wall.
Coverage down between rows and over trellis, where a ground rig bruises fruit and never quite reaches the top third.
Work carried out over standing water with no rutting, no levee repair afterwards and no three-day wait to dry.
Brush and invasive weeds knocked back plant by plant across country a crew would need a full week to walk.
High-value surfaces where a single wheel mark is a defect and even coverage is the entire product being sold.
Seeding burn scars, steep faces and riverbank replanting, on ground no machine has any business being on.
We ask for a review once the season is closed out and the numbers are settled. Nothing below has been edited.
What sold me was the follow-up flight. They come back a week later and show you whether the pass did anything. I had never had a service offer to be graded on its own work before.
Our blocks sit on a grade nobody wants to take a sprayer onto. The crew finished the whole thing in an afternoon, and the top of the canopy came out better covered than we ever managed by hand.
The chemical we did not buy covered the contract before August. The surprise was the water map, which explained a patch we had been treating as disease for four straight years.
They flew the quarter I had written off two years ago. The report came back the same evening with a tile line marked on it, and that field is back in rotation.
The as-applied log settled a boundary argument with a neighbour inside ten minutes. That alone was worth the season.
We used to spray on the calendar. Now we spray on the map, and the invoice for chemistry came in a third lower without a single acre going backwards.
Working notes from the crew and the agronomy desk. No launches, no press releases.
Once the canopy closes, the index everyone quotes stops moving and stops telling you anything. NDVI saturates somewhere around V10 on most…
Read the noteWe went back through 4,000 missions to find out why flights got scrubbed. Three quarters of them traced to the same short…
Read the noteFlight time, battery cycles, product and labour laid out line by line, set against the identical job run with a ground rig.…
Read the note
We will fly it once at our cost, hand over the report in full, and leave the decision with you. Demo slots go out within ten working days right through the season.
