so i farm about 2200 acres in the midwest, mix of corn and beans mostly, and ive been thinking about adding aerial scouting to what i already do on the ground. been flying a Mavic 3 for general farm stuff but obviously the RGB camera is limited for actual agronomic work. i know i need a multispectral setup to generate anything useful like NDVI but i honestly dont know where to start with that side of things.

the options i keep seeing come up are the Micasense Altum-PT and the DJI P4 Multispectral, and there's also the Sentera stuff but i cant find many people actually talking about real world use cases for any of these. price range is something im trying to figure out too because if i can justify the ROI on maybe catching a nutrient deficiency early or identifying a compaction zone that needs attention it makes sense but i dont want to spend 15k on something that ends up being redundant with what a crop consultant does anyway.

also just practically speaking, how much ground can you reasonably cover in a day with a setup like this and still get usable data? im not trying to be a mapping company, just want something practical for my own operation

the P4 Multi is honestly a solid starting point if your already in the DJI ecosystem and dont want to deal with a bunch of third party software integration headaches. the Micasense stuff is more capable but also way more involved to process correctly, you really need to understand what your doing with the calibration panels and the lighting conditions or your NDVI outputs are garbage. ive seen guys spend a lot of money on Altum setups and then just generate pretty colored maps that dont actually inform any decisions because they never learned the agronomy side of interpreting the data.

on coverage, with a P4 Multi on a M300 or similar platform doing a proper mapping grid at like 400ft AGL you can realistically cover 500-700 acres in a day depending on battery management and wind. on 2200 acres you probably want a two day scout cycle which is totally manageable. the question is really what youre going to do with the data after, thats where most people drop the ball

im kind of in the same boat as you honestly, started looking at this stuff last winter. from what ive gathered talking to a few agronomists the data is only as good as your ground truth, meaning you still need to walk fields and confirm what the maps are showing or your just chasing artifacts from shadows and soil variability. but for flagging areas that need a closer look it sounds like it genuinely works. i ended up waiting on buying anything because i found out a neighbor with a Sentera setup was willing to fly my fields for cost share, might be worth asking around before you drop the cash