so ive been running about 800 acres of corn and soybeans for the past few years and we still do most of our scouting on foot or ATV which takes forever and honestly we miss stuff until its too late. a neighbor of mine just picked up a DJI Agras T40 for spraying and keeps telling me to at least get something for NDVI mapping even if i dont go full spraying drone yet.

the thing is im not sure if the ROI makes sense for someone my size. like the big operations with 5000+ acres its a no brainer but 800 acres i dunno. was looking at maybe a Mavic 3 Multispectral or something in that range for monitoring and then maybe later add spraying capability separately. does anyone actually run this kind of setup on a mid-size farm or is everyone here either hobbyist or massive commercial operation

also how steep is the learning curve for actually interpreting the NDVI data, not just collecting it. thats the part that worries me more than the flying honestly

800 acres is actually a pretty solid sweet spot for this stuff in my opinion. not so big that you need a whole fleet but big enough that the time savings add up real fast. i run about 600 acres in central Illinois and switched to drone scouting two seasons ago with the Mavic 3 Multispectral you mentioned. the hardware side is honestly fine once you get your waypoint missions dialed in, i can cover my whole operation in a morning and have processed maps by afternoon.

the NDVI interpretation thing is the real learning curve yeah. the raw data doesnt tell you much until you build up a few seasons of your own reference points. like what does a 0.6 vs 0.7 NDVI actually mean for YOUR corn at YOUR growth stage in YOUR soil ? thats not something a youtube tutorial covers. i ended up working with a local agronomist for the first season just to ground-truth what i was seeing from the air against what was actually happening in the canopy. worth every penny of that consultation cost.

for spraying i wouldnt rush into it. the T40 is incredible hardware but the regulatory side, at least here in the US, is still a bit of a headache for ag spraying and you need proper licensing. monitoring first is the right call.

not sure about the multispectral ROI for your size but my buddy farms similar acreage and he just uses a regular Mavic 3 Classic for visual scouting and says it changed everything for him. like not even the fancy multispectral version just high res RGB and he can spot pressure way earlier than walking. might be a cheaper entry point to see if the workflow even fits how you operate before spending on the multispectral sensors