Every A-hole with a Phantom 3 and access to DroneDeploy is touting their stuff as the next huge Ag comp
any. Here I will let you in on a little secret...your data sucks, your prices are too high, and you are never going to make it in the UAV industry as an Ag specialist.
Here is the deal. Drone Deploy is an extremely cool piece of software.
For every weekend warrior, or Dad who is trying to justify buying cool technology to his wife, Drone Deploy is the coolest thing around.
They tell you exactly how to create the 3D orthomosaics, if you get the little NDVI filter for your camera lens, you can create awesome NDVI maps, and if you are really good you may even break into Pix4D itself and start goofing around with their software. But here is the deal... It's not that hard to do.
Let me paint you something of a word picture here...
Imagine you are a farmer that makes $80,000 a year by working your ass off to grow crops. Some drone pilot comes up to you and says he can give you amazing data on your crops with this little rink-a-dink drone. You think that is pretty cool...until he quotes you a price in the thousands. This drone guy obviously needs to pay his bills, cover his equipment, and make it worth his while to do all of the data processing.
But the problem is...the technology is so simple that this farmer could pay for his equipment by just doing himself once. All he needs is a $700 Ag Phantom 2 and a subscription to drone deploy. Then he can stand in the middle of his own field, hit go, and create all of his own NDVI maps.
Everyone in this industry for some reason thinks they are discovering some new, uncharted territory that will change the face of the Ag industry. But this is just unfortunately not true.
So at the end of the day, I think all you weekend warriors need to take a more hardy look at what you are trying to accomplish with your drones.
Yeah you can make some cool stuff with Drone Deploy, but ultimately, a viable business option it is not.
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