so ive been running a small operation, about 400 acres of corn and soybeans, and my agronomist has been pushing me to look at drone-based NDVI mapping instead of doing the usual boots-on-ground scouting we do twice a week. the thing is, i already have a Mavic 3 Multispectral that i bought last season mostly because it seemed like a good deal at the time, but honestly i havent gotten nearly as much use out of it as i thought i would.

the software side is what kills me. i tried Pix4Dfields for a while and the outputs look great but stitching a full field takes forever on my laptop and im not sure im interpreting the index maps correctly anyway. like i can see the stressed areas in red but then i walk out there and sometimes its just drainage issues i already knew about, not anything new.

is there a point where this actually starts saving you time and money or is it mostly useful for larger operations where you can spread the cost around? genuinely asking because right now it feels like i spend more time processing than i do actually flying.

honestly the processing thing is the real bottleneck for most small operators and nobody talks about it enough. what specs is your laptop running? because Pix4Dfields is actually one of the lighter options compared to something like Agisoft but it still wants a decent GPU to not be painful. i moved to doing cloud processing through DJI Terra for quick missions and only pull out the heavier software when i actually need centimeter-level accuracy on something specific.

for 400 acres NDVI absolutely makes sense though, especially late season when you're trying to catch nitrogen deficiency before it actually shows up visually. the trick is you kind of have to fly consistently like every 10-14 days and build a baseline over a season before the maps start telling you anything you didnt already know. first year is mostly just learning what your fields look like spectrally. second year is when it gets useful.

same situation here kind of, i do about 600 acres and the Multispectral sits in the case more than i'd like to admit. one thing that actually helped me was linking up with a local co-op that has an agronomist who knows how to read the outputs, because honestly the raw NDVI isnt the issue its knowing what to do with it after. once i stopped trying to interpret everything myself and just handed the processed maps over to someone who knew crop health stuff it became way more valuable. might be worth seeing if your agronomist can take on that part so you just focus on the flying and processing side.