ok so this has been bugging me for a while. im helping a cousin who farms about 600 acres of mixed wheat and canola and we're trying to figure out if getting a proper multispectral setup like the Micasense Altum or even just the RedEdge is actually going to tell us anything more actionable than what we can already see with a decent RGB camera and a trained eye.

ive read all the usual stuff about NDVI being better at catching stress before it's visible but honestly when i talk to the agronomist we work with she says most of the time by the time the drone data is processed and in front of someone who can act on it the window for a useful intervention has already closed anyway. so im wondering if the workflow problem is bigger than the sensor problem.

anyone actually running multispectral on smaller acreage and finding it worth the cost and processing overhead? the Altum is not cheap and adding pix4dfields or agisoft on top of that is another chunk every year.

your agronomist has a point honestly. ive been doing this for a few years and the bottleneck is almost never the sensor data ? its getting someone to look at it and make a decision fast enough. that said i do think multispectral earns its keep for things like variable rate application planning where you're not trying to react quickly but just trying to build better prescription maps for the following season or for nitrogen top-dressing decisions mid-season where you have a little more time window. for pure scouting and early stress response though a good pilot with an RGB camera who actually knows what nitrogen deficiency looks like from 30m up can be surprisingly effective.

i rented a RedEdge setup through a local dealer for one season before committing and that honestly saved me from a probably bad purchase for my scale of operation. worth seeing if anyone near you does short term rentals. also Pix4D has a fields-specific product thats less insane pricing than the full photogrammetry suite if you haven't looked at that already, though i switched to doing most of my processing in QGIS with the semi-free plugins and its fine once you get used to it