Depending on the field that percentage can be as high as 10. Depending on the crop, the value you gain by aerial application can be in the 10s of thousands of dollars.
There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in agtech, most of it is practical, too. But yeah, guidance add-ons to a farmer's existing equipment has a pretty good return on investment for the farmer.
There is a soy bean pest that can invade crops on my family’s farm. If treatment is needed early, the cost effective solution is to drive a spray rig. Later in the season, that causes too much crop damage. So then it becomes a calculation of the loss due to pest versus cost of arial application.
In the end, it all comes down to cost per acre and the benefit needs to exceed that.
-posted from my self driving tractor.
> Driving a tractor through a field will crush a percentage of your crop
Even if there are "tracks" to account for the tractor's wheels? Nothing would have been planted there in the first place?
At this point in the crops life, the canopy is quite filled out, and a large portion of it is already dry. By driving through the feild at this time you knock the seed from the pod onto the ground, where it is impossible to harvest. Thus it is better to do desiccation from the air.
For this kind of application, I think drones have a snowball's chance in hell of getting any kind of traction with farmers in the area. Their capacity is too small, their runtime is too short, the area they can cover per unit time is too poor, etc.