|
| My personal opinion is that the people that stand to make a lot of money in this are the software developers and hardware manufacturers. Service providers (us) are likely to be replaced fairly quickly, since the entire appeal of the industry is automation. They'll get much easier for your average Joe to operate and collect data, and the cloud services will get more reliable in their accuracy checking and analytics. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with large endurance drones that cover entire regions weekly and offer the imagery as a subscription service as well, like satellites. Who knows.
I actually started the company by myself. I made a career change about 5 years ago and am a full time firefighter. That's why I became interested in drones. I got a lot of interest from farmers when they saw what cameras I was mounting on them for firefighting, which is where the whole agriculture angle came from for me (and how I met the Agronomist that is now part of the company).
Due to the experience needed to accurately interpret the data (and the potential liability), all we do for individual growers is provide the acquisition and processing, as well as the GIS work and index creation. I don't interpret the results. I actually talk a lot of people out of the multispectral outputs right now, unless they have a good understanding and are familiar with it. I think that the industry needs a couple more years of trending and analysis to be able to automate the interpretation of some of the data and establish standards of practice. Until then, RGB imagery provides a clear service for people that aren't familiar with the indices.
I prefer to do work for research driven projects, such as with universities, software developers and sensor manufacturers. Luckily, this is most of our work so far this year....it's also much steadier work, since most of them want flights on a bi-monthly basis over test plots, and occasionally more often for varying weather conditions. In these situations, we're really just the licensed and legal "field labor" for the people that are putting the real work into making the service useful. I'll support them as often as possible.
It's definitely daunting to break in to, but I'm probably the opposite of most of you. I had zero experience in agriculture 2 years ago(and still not much), but the rest of it was easier for me to dive into.
And I'm a big fan of sharing and learning publically, so I don't mind keeping it public (unless it needs to be private). | |
|
Introduction from "the other side of the Aisle"
