We’ve heard of the benefits of drones in ag: speeding up crop scouting, identifying pest or nutrient issues in crops and addressing them right away, checking for weather damage, finding pivot breakdowns on irrigation systems, checking drainage system performance – the list goes on. (Search “Take to the sky” on FarmIndustryNews.com to read the original article from 2013 on the details of drone technology and benefits of use.) But how do these things help growers justify the cost of purchasing a drone in the first place?

The American Farm Bureau released its findings last month on a study calculating the return on investment that drones for agriculture can provide growers. They looked at using drones for crop scouting, crop insurance and 3D terrain mapping. In partnership with Informa Economics, and Drone as a Service (measure32.com) the created an ROI Calculator to measure drone usage ROI. When measuring the return gained through enhanced crop scouting, for example, ROI is $12 per acre for corn, $2.60 per acre for soybeans, and $2.30 per acre for wheat. The ROI Calculator used to measure this will soon be available for farmers and service providers online.

While this is one specific example, and the types of drones available and the field conditions in which they operate vary widely, it’s a solid case showing how drone usage can pay off.

Colby spoke at this year’s InfoAg precision ag conference last month in St. Louis to a packed room of growers and precision ag professionals and one of his key messages was that you do not have to spend a lot of money to get a useful UAS package.

“You don’t need to spend big money to get a great ship for ag use. You can spend $1000 to $2000 depending on extras, additional batteries, a case, etc. And they are reliable. If operated correctly these ships are very good tools that work very well,” he says. Compared to what’s spent on some other farm inputs, that’s pretty cheap. And the type of imagery you get out of a system – like basic RBG photos – can tell you a lot about your fields. Colby notes that a 4^th generation farmer is going to know what he or she sees when shown an image of a field with noticeable yellow strips showing a deficiency in their corn. NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) imagery takes it a step further by indicating density but may require working with a service provider to get real meaning out of the process.