ok so this might be a dumb question but bear with me. ive got a Mavic 3 Multispectral and ive been flying it over my test plots for a few months now generating NDVI data and the maps look really impressive and i can clearly see variability in the fields. problem is i have no idea what to actually DO with that information in a practical sense.

like i can see there's a low-vigor zone in the northeast corner of field 3 but then what. do i just go spray more fertilizer there manually? does anyone actually feed this into variable rate application equipment and does that require the spraying drone to talk to the mapping software or is it a totally separate workflow. i feel like ive spent a lot of time getting good at the data collection part and not enough time thinking about what comes after

also i know some people use Pix4Dfields and others use Agro software platforms, curious what people find actually useful vs just dashboard noise

yeah this is the gap that nobody really talks about when they're selling you the multispectral setup. the data collection is the easy part lol. what we do ? and this took a while to figure out ? is export the prescription maps out of Pix4Dfields as shapefiles and then load those into our John Deere Operations Center which then talks to the variable rate controller on our spreader. works reasonably well but the JD integration is obviously not gonna apply to everyone and you need the right terminal in the cab.

if you dont have VR-capable ground equipment it gets more complicated. some people are doing it with the DJI Agras where you can supposedly load a prescription map and it adjusts flow rate on the fly but ive never actually tested that workflow myself, just seen it demoed. the demo always looks cleaner than real life though.

honestly the NDVI maps from consumer-grade multispectral are fine for spotting obvious problems but i'd be careful about reading too much into the fine detail. calibration matters a lot and if you're not doing a proper reflectance calibration panel before each flight the numbers can drift enough to make inter-flight comparisons unreliable. not saying your data is wrong just something to check if you're making actual input decisions off it. seen people over-apply to areas that looked stressed but were just in shadow from a cloud at the wrong moment.