[AShyFig]

The advantage flying sprayers have over a tractor is loss. Driving a tractor through a field will crush a percentage of your crop, and a percentage of that crushed crop will never recover.

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.

[eschneider]

That's a solved problem with precision guided, self-steering tractors. They also remember where they planted crops so they won't roll over plants later.

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.

[dbcurtis]

That’s an overly simplistic assertion. It depends on the crop, how it is planted, and maturity.

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.

[AShyFig]

This future is a lot closer than most people think, but is hardly a solved problem.

-posted from my self driving tractor.

[viraptor]

You're still not gaining much, right? You're just not losing what's already planted, but you could still plant more if you didn't have to drive in the first place - or do I misunderstand the precision driving?

[bguebert]

That might be for some crops, but some like wheat are planted too close together to drive anything between them without knocking some down.

[barbazoo]

By not having to drive a tractor through it regularly maybe crops can also be planted closer together? Although, there's still the harvesting at the end at which point you'd lose those gains again.

> 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?

[MegaDeKay]

I live in a rural area and there are huge grain fields all around me. At least for these kind of crops, the field is seeded 100%. There are no gaps for the tractor wheels. Having said that, you rarely see tractors pulling a sprayer in the first place anymore. Most crops around here are sprayed by purpose built sprayers that have tons of ground clearance, have relatively narrow tires, very wide booms, and are comparatively very light vs. a massive tractor. They can be built so light because they aren't used to pull heavy implements behind them. All they carry is the chemical, the spray booms, and the operator. Later in the season, it would be tough to pick out the path these things took through the field if you could at all. As for costs, the spraying is often done on contract so the farmers don't buy the sprayers in the first place: they pay for the service plus the chemicals.

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.

[mrguyorama]

Lol I was going to say: None of the hundreds of square miles of crops where I grew up have this problem. Maybe corn and soybean fields omit the structure to attempt to get more yield? In which case, crushing some of it is still likely a positive yield compared to not planting ruts.

[tubetime]

these exist, they're called tramways but they are more common in europe.