so ive been running about 340 acres of corn and soybeans for the past few years and we do all our scouting on foot or ATV which honestly takes forever and we still miss stuff. a neighbor of mine just picked up a DJI Agras T40 for spraying and hes been pretty happy with it but thats more than i can justify right now.

im more interested in just the monitoring side first ? like using something with a decent multispectral camera to actually see NDVI and figure out where the stress is before it gets out of hand. been looking at the Mavic 3 Multispectral but also heard people using regular RGB drones with some processing software and getting decent results for certain things.

question is really whether this makes sense at my scale. 340 acres isnt huge but its not tiny either. anyone here actually doing this on a similar sized operation or is this more of a large-scale farm thing where the ROI actually pencils out

340 acres is actually a pretty solid use case for the M3M honestly. we run it on about 280 acres and the time savings on scouting alone made it worth it by the second season. the NDVI maps arent magic but when you can see a stress zone developing in the middle of a field before you'd ever walk over there, it changes how you think about things. we caught a drainage issue early last year that we would have totally missed until it was too late to do anything meaningful about it.

the software side is where people underestimate the learning curve though. pix4dfields isnt hard but you do need to put time into understanding what the indices are actually telling you versus just having a pretty color map. some agronomists will help you interpret it but a lot of them are still catching up on this stuff too depending on where you are.

im kind of in the same boat, little smaller acreage than you but ive been messing around with a Phantom 4 Multispectral i got used and honestly for the price it does more than i expected. its older but the data is still usable if you calibrate properly before each flight. just throwing that out there if budget is the main thing holding you back on the M3M