so ive been running about 400 acres of corn and soybeans for the past few years and we still do a lot of our scouting on foot or with a side by side which honestly is just not cutting it anymore. losing too much time especially mid season when things can go sideways fast.

been looking at getting something set up for NDVI mapping and maybe thermal for stress detection, but the price jump from a basic mavic to something like the P4 Multispectral or even looking at senseFly stuff is pretty significant. trying to figure out if anyone here has actually done this transition and whether the data you get back is actually actionable or if youre just paying for pretty colored maps that you then have to hire someone to interpret anyway.

our agronomist is semi on board but hes old school and i feel like i'd be fighting an uphill battle getting the workflow integrated. anyone dealt with that situation where the human side of the adoption is harder than the tech side?

yeah the human side is 100% the harder problem, the tech is almost the easy part once you get your calibration panel workflow sorted out. we went through almost exactly this two seasons ago on a grain operation in central illinois, similar acreage. the P4 Multispectral is honestly pretty solid for what it costs, the data you pull into Pix4Dfields is readable enough that even our more traditional guys came around once they saw a stress zone flagged on a map actually correspond to where they found rootworm pressure three days later.

thing that helped us was not trying to replace scouting entirely at first, just using the drone maps to prioritize where to walk. made it less threatening to the guys who'd been doing it by eye for 30 years. takes a season or two before you really trust the data yourself too honestly.

curious what GSD you're targeting for the NDVI work? like are you flying high enough for field-level decisions or trying to get down to individual plant resolution because that changes what platform actually makes sense. also does your agronomist have any experience reading multispectral outputs at all or are you starting from zero with him