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Comment by topherhaddad | Hacker News Reader

Yeah great point, there are a number of agriculture applications that have no need for this level of spatial resolution. Certain high value crops only use drones today due to the resolution, so we'll be able to support those applications. Additionally, there's ways to combine visible + thermal to evaluate water crop stress to detect potential irrigation issues or improvements.

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>Certain high value crops only use drones today due to the resolution, so we'll be able to support those applications.

For a farm sized area, wouldn't an autonomous drone be a lot cheaper&better?

This is not a binary answer; it depends. It is also not "satellites or drones"; both can be used as complementary based on the degree of data precision needed and the budget in hand.

Aren't drones cheaper and better?

I guess drones are much more expensive. You can buy a satellite tasking plan for much less than a continuously running drone campaign for the same area.

Of course drones are better, as in having an arbitrarily high resolution and being 100% under your control.

If I have a 2 sq km farm that I want pictures of once a week that will cost me $1500 through Albedo. Drones can be had for half that. I don't know that there's an out of the box solution that can automate it, but it seems like the better long term solution.

I believe the drones with a camera that can take such high precision shots (assuming hyperspectral) will cost lot more than that. For quick reference, check out DJI's Agri Drones[1].

For context; we talked to a few tea growers in the eastern side of India. They spend north of $150,000 - $200,000 on drones and UAVs to track/collect data over 20,000 hectares of tea farms. Our sample satellite date can do the same at a fraction of the cost though the precision drops by about 10%. The idea then now is to combine satellite imagery solution + occasional high-precision drone sweeps.

1. https://ag.dji.com/

I don't think I understand how pricing works, but at the most expensive level, it seems to be $15/km^2, so 2 km^2 once a week would be $30/week, right?

I believe, his calculation is roughly at $30 per week x 4 weeks per month x 12 months a year.

Anyway, the cost of a 3-meter resolution loaded with multispectral bands and metadata will be just about a dollar per sqkm or even less.

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