so ive been running a pretty traditional operation, about 800 acres of corn and soybeans, and we've always done manual scouting with a couple part time guys walking fields every week or two. works fine but we're always a few days behind on catching things like early blight or pest pressure building up in the northwest corners where drainage is bad.

been looking seriously at adding a fixed wing like the senseFly eBee or maybe just a more capable multirotor with an NDVI payload for the monitoring side. the problem is im trying to figure out if jumping in partway through the season makes sense or if im just gonna be spending money and not have enough data history to actually do anything useful with it.

anyone actually made this switch mid season and seen it pay off that year, or is the real value in the year-over-year data building up over time? cause i can see it going either way honestly

honestly the year over year data thing is real but its not the whole picture. we started mid july two seasons ago and even that first partial season the NDVI maps caught a nitrogen deficiency pocket in one field that our scout had walked right past twice. saved us from losing probably 30 bushels per acre on about 40 acres so the roi math worked out pretty fast even without historical baselines.

the fixed wing question depends on your field layout though. if your 800 acres is relatively consolidated the eBee makes sense, but if youre dealing with a lot of small scattered parcels the turnaround time for fixed wing launches starts eating into your efficiency. we run a phantom 4 multispectral for most stuff now and its just a lot more flexible day to day even if coverage rate isnt as high

mid season is fine dont overthink it. even just getting one good flight over your problem areas before you have to make fungicide decisions is better than guessing. the drainage corners you mentioned would show up immediately on any halfway decent thermal or multispectral pass