so ive been running an Agras T40 for about a season and a half now and honestly its been great but the price point is just brutal when youre doing small to mid size farms on contract. a lot of my clients are 200-600 acre operations and the margins just arent there to justify the maintenance costs on the T40 especially after that pump assembly went out on me in july which was a whole thing.

anyway been looking at some of the XAG P100 stuff and also some of the lesser known chinese brands that are starting to show up through US distributors. curious if anyone has actually run one of these alternatives through a real season doing like corn fungicide apps or something similar. not just test flights, actual work. the flow rate specs look okay on paper but ive been burned before by specs that dont hold up when youre trying to get 80 acres done before the wind picks up.

also wondering about the radar avoidance on the cheaper units because terrain following is not optional for me, a lot of the fields i fly have drainage ditches and elevation changes and i am not interested in burying a $15k drone in a soybean field

ran an XAG V40 for most of last season doing rice and some wheat in the midwest. honestly it held up better than i expected but the software is where it gets annoying - the mission planning app is not as polished as DJI's and you'll spend a lot more time fiddling with overlap settings and spray width calibration before you trust the coverage maps. terrain following worked fine on my fields which are pretty flat so i cant speak to the ditch situation but the radar unit felt solid. flow rate was consistent once i dialed in the nozzle pressure, that took maybe a day of testing though.

the support situation is what id really think hard about. with DJI you can at least call someone. with some of these others youre kind of hoping the distributor actually knows the product.

not exactly the same but i demoed one of the Hylio AG-272s at a farm show earlier this year and was pretty impressed for what it is. obviously not in the same league as the T40 for tank capacity but for smaller fields the price difference is significant enough that you could buy like two of them and still come out ahead. just throwing that out there as another option to look at if you havent already