so ive been running about 800 acres of corn and soybeans for the past few years and we still do a lot of manual scouting which honestly takes forever and we miss stuff constantly. a neighbor of mine started using a fixed wing for NDVI passes and swears by it but im not sure if thats the right move for my operation or if i should just go with a multirotor setup that can also do variable rate applications down the line.

the cost is obviously a concern but its more like i dont even know where to start. theres so many platforms now - djis agras stuff, the parrot sequoia sensors, all the autel stuff. does anyone actually use this day to day on working farms or is it still kind of a gimmick at this scale. my agronomist thinks its worthwhile but she hasnt actually flown anything herself so i dont fully trust that recommendation if im being honest.

mainly just trying to figure out if the ROI pencils out before i drop 15-20k on hardware and software subscriptions

not a gimmick at all but the ROI question really depends on what your biggest cost is right now. for us the scouting labor was killing us - we were paying two guys basically full time from june through august and even then coverage was inconsistent. once we got a decent multirotor with an RGB + multispectral setup we cut that down to maybe a half day a week of actual ground truthing after the drone flags problem areas. the software side is where it got annoying though, pix4dfields works pretty well but its another subscription on top of everything else and the learning curve for actually interpreting NDVI outputs correctly took longer than learning to fly.

on the fixed wing vs multirotor thing for your scale - honestly 800 acres is kind of in the middle where either could work. fixed wing covers ground faster which matters if youre trying to do frequent passes during the growing season, but if you want to eventually do spot spraying then you need a multirotor anyway so might as well standardize. the agras T40 is what most of the serious ag guys around here are running, its not cheap but the build quality is there and dji support for ag products has gotten better.

we tried a sequoia sensor last season on a phantom 4 and it worked but the processing was kind of a pain. ended up using ageras cloud thing which was fine i guess. didnt end up saving us much time that year but we were also figuring it out as we went so probably not a fair test