so ive been going back and forth on this for probably six months now. we run about 340 acres of wine grapes in central california and right now we're doing all our spraying with a tractor boom setup which works fine but the terrain on the hillside blocks is just brutal and we lose a lot of time and honestly probably a lot of coverage consistency on those rows.

been demoing the agras t40 a couple times and yeah its impressive but the price point is making my accountant cry. trying to figure out if anyone here has actually run one of these for more than a season on vines specifically, not just flat row crops. the canopy penetration thing is what gets me ? our rows are pretty dense by august and im not convinced the downwash is actually getting product all the way through versus what the sales rep says

also curious about the whole precision prescription map workflow, are people actually doing variable rate on these or mostly just flying fixed rate and calling it precision farming

ran the t30 for two seasons on almonds before upgrading and the canopy pen question is real and honestly depends more on your flight parameters than the drone itself. we found flying lower and slower ? like 2m above canopy at 4-5m/s ? made a huge difference versus the defaults the agras app wants to throw at you. the downwash at 40kg payload is no joke but you have to be intentional about it

on the variable rate stuff, yeah we are actually doing it but it took a while to get the workflow dialed. we pull ndvi layers from our sentinel-2 data every couple weeks and then run it through a pretty basic prescription tool before uploading the job. its not magic and your ground truth still matters but we've cut our copper fungicide use by something like 18% this season which pays for itself eventually. the hardware cost is brutal upfront no way around that but factor in labor and equipment hours on those hillside blocks and the math starts making more sense

not on vines but i did a season on steep hops and the terrain following on the agras is genuinely one of the better things about it, the radar altimeter actually handles irregular canopy heights pretty well once you tune the settings. the sales demo stuff is always going to be optimistic though, just set that expectation now lol