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East Central Ia | We are going to be updating our sprayer in the next couple of years, so I am starting my research now.
I have been spraying soybean fungicide the last week and see people spraying with drones got me thinking.
Has anyone switched to spraying everything in a corn bean rotation over to drone/s and been successful?
Looks like a top tier setup for drone/s spraying will still be significantly cheaper than a newer model used SP machine.
We are 100% cover crop, 20" corn and twin row beans in rolling to hilly ground.
Just under 3k acres and 50/50 corn bean rotation.
We typically burn down the cover crop with Glyphosate and some metolachlor, plant, and then spray our post application early at the V/E to V1/2 timeframe depending on the season. This helps to eliminate wheel track issues in the corn, we typically leave the floaters on the sprayer, and you can't see the wheel tracks.
But if weather holds us back, we can run over a decent amount of corn in later stages. Or we have a few fields that are long and narrow and just aren't conducive to spraying across the rows.
So many questions I don't even know where to start honestly. But I read that a very high number of acres in other countries are sprayed entirely with drones and wonder if the capabilities for that are here in the US, coming, or won't translate to our scale of farming.
I have a computer science degree so technology is in my wheel house, but I am turning 48 this fall with a bad back and bouncing around in the sprayer gets less and less appealing by the day.
Are there enough chemical products that work aerially to make a solid, economical program? I see Enlist is NOT approved for aerial application but 24d LV6 is etc...
Maybe its a deal where we keep our current machine and add a drone to see where/how it fits in?
Honestly spraying our own fungicide would pretty much pay for a drone setup in a year or two.
I could also see an end row pass in our corn acres right before canopy with an overlap into our grass waterways with a broadleaf herbicide would be very beneficial in controlling the waterhemp that comes in hard between the edge of the crop and the grass waterway/fenceline.
Spot spraying would also be quite useful. Especially in years like this one where there are handfuls of small gaps in almost every soybean field that fill up with waterhemp late in the year but aren't accessible. This doesn't happen every year but some years are worse than others, and this year is bad. I attribute this to a few lightning strikes, but mostly it's from rodents. I assume ground squirrels as they are typically 10-15' in diameter and have holes in the ground in them.
Is there any see and spray type technology for drones to date? Or a separate mapping pass and a custom application map to hit the weeds?
This is getting long so I will stop her for now!
Thanks in advance!
Edited by bleedred 7/26/2025 10:35
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Has anyone gone from a Self Propelled machine to Drones successfully?
