ok so this has been bugging me for a while. i fly a Mavic 3 Multispectral over fields for a few different farmers around here and the data looks great, the NDVI maps are clean and i can clearly see stress zones and variability in canopy. but every time i sit down with the grower and go through the maps they kind of nod along and then just go do whatever they were already planning to do anyway.

im starting to wonder if the disconnect is on my end ? like maybe im not presenting the data in a way that connects to actual decisions ? or if precision farming just hasnt really hit that tipping point yet where the agronomists and growers are set up to act on variable rate prescriptions. curious what others are seeing. are any of you generating VR prescriptions from drone NDVI and getting them actually loaded into a spreader or sprayer controller? or is it mostly still a scouting aid.

yeah this is the real problem with ag drone data and nobody talks about it enough. the tech side is mostly solved at this point, its the workflow on the farm side that's broken. most growers either dont have VR capable equipment or their agronomist isnt trained to build prescriptions from raster inputs. ive had decent luck partnering directly with the agronomist first before even talking to the grower ? if the agronomist buys in they do the translation work and it actually changes things. without that middleman its just pretty maps.

so anyway i finally got a full loop working last fall on a corn field, flew the M3M, processed in Pix4Dfields, built a zone map, exported a shapefile prescription and it went into a John Deere Operations Center and ran on a 4940 applicator. it worked but it took like 3 people coordinating who all understood different pieces of the puzzle and i dont think any normal farm operation has that in house yet. the deere ecosystem helps a lot if theyre already in it but if theyre running older iron forget it. also the timing has to be right, flying after a stress event but before the application window closes is trickier than it sounds when weather is involved.