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Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

I'm life long friends with with family that owns a 80,000 acre grain and soybean farm, and they looked into drones last year or so for crop assessment, but found it wasn't really effective from either an analysis or price perspective. The drones didn't really have the range or endurance to properly sample the fields (we're talking fields of several square miles each), and the resolution of the camera just couldn't give you the detail you needed. It was basically just a waste.

Perhaps if there were more specific imaging sensors on the drones or something, you'd have something, but a simple visible light camera just doesn't reveal enough info.

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> but a simple visible light camera just doesn't reveal enough info.

One would think that IR would be very useful in diagnosing plant types and crop coverage.

>80,000 acre grain and soybean farm

I misread that humorously as a '80,000 acre soylent green farm' somehow. Guess it's bedtime for me.

I would like to have a conversation with you or them to convince them otherwise. I have been operating my own ag robotics company for 2 years and have contracts with biggest ag producers in Canada. 80,000 sounded big but not as big as biggest producers of wheat or corn!

How did you get into this business? Are there opportunities for small business?

lots of opportunities! let me know if you are interested in having a conversation. My contact info is in above comment.

I'd be interested in hearing your arguments/use cases for drones over broad-acre properties, we've got(generally wheat) producers here with properties > 150'000 acres.

shoot an email to "amirbeta" on outlook and we will have a discussion.

Mavrx uses low flying aircraft to do the same analysis. It's surpringly cheaper to pay local pilots by the hour then to manage drones at this point although there's surely a point in the future when this changes over...

Any coöperation in a foreign country possible?

Hi, can you shoot me an e-mail? I've got a few questions I'd like to ask.

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