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Central IL | So this summer I have been looking into a project involving drones and NDVI maps. Our seeds salesman knows that I have a drone (Phantom 3 Advanced) and has been wanting to talk to me about using me this summer to scout fields. We have talked a little but I have been busy with school. He has talked to me about some inferred imagery but not too much. I was looking into this, and really all I can come up with for NDVI Mapping so far is:
-Sentera - This one I saw quite some time ago, and the upfront cost when you already have a drone is around 2500$, which is a lot for a broke college student to throw down with no guaranteed return on it. From the looks of it, It seems like Sentera does the whole 9 yards though. From mapping to exporting in .shp.
-Ag Scout - The upfront cost on this is about half of Sentra, The only drawback is you have to have a subscription to drone deploy (which isn't too awfully much)
One thing also is that it only exports in a .tif file, I have seen programs that will convert this .tif file to a .shapefile, but I'm not sure if it is that accurate.
The main reason this whole idea caught my eye is because we had a Becks Hybrids salesman come talk to my Ag Econ class and show us their precision ag website (Farmserver.com) and show us about how if you have these yield maps (Really anything in a .shp format), you could turn this into a prescription for your field. This would work great for in growing season decisions like disease and really overall health control. His company charged around 2$ an acre, so if this were the case this investment could pay for itself at around 1,000 acres (depending on the company I go with). This Becks Hybrid guy talked about how he has prescribed around 25,000 acres in this past year which is what really caught my eye. Sorry about the many stories, but I guess the point to this post is this:
-Are there any other NDVI mapping programs / companies you have seen that look like their worth it?
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-If you were a farmer that was not contacted through your seeds salesman, would you still be interested in something like this? The reason I ask this is because I plan on outreaching my potential instead of just relying on our seeds salesman for customers. I grew up and still help on a small farm where precision Ag is not worth the amount of land we farm so I'm not sure how interested a bigger operation would be in this sort of thing.
Any advice is welcome, just trying to figure out my summer income.
Also one thing I found quite interesting is elevation maps that can be prescribed to change population multiple times within a field. This isn't something absolute necessary to start out with but something I found quite interesting.
Edited by andyj2896 2/15/2016 12:04
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NDVI Mappers
