FAQ
Straight answers
The questions farmers actually ask before hiring a drone — what it costs, what you get, what the imagery can and can't tell you, and what we're not certified for yet.
- Do you spray? Can you kill my weeds?
- Not yet — and we'd rather tell you that up front than waste your call. Commercial aerial application requires an FAA Part 137 agricultural aircraft operator certificate and an Alabama Department of Agriculture & Industries commercial applicator license in the aerial category. We're working toward both, and we won't quote or fly application work until they're issued. What we do today is mapping: crop health imagery, orthomosaics, and prescription files. If you tell us where the problem is, we'll tell you exactly where it is and how bad — then you, your co-op, or your custom applicator handles the spraying.
- What is NDVI mapping, and what does it actually tell me?
- NDVI imagery measures how strongly your crop reflects near-infrared light — healthy plants reflect a lot, stressed plants don't. A 20-minute flight produces a color-coded vigor map of the whole field showing poor emergence, disease pressure, nutrient deficiency, and water stress — often two to three weeks before symptoms are visible to the eye. It turns 'walk the field and hope you find it' into 'here's the problem, here's exactly where.' What it won't do is name the cause: NDVI shows you a weak zone, not whether it's nitrogen, water, disease, or a compacted headland. That's what the ground-truth walk you take afterward is for — but now you know exactly where to walk.
- What's the difference between NDVI and NDRE?
- NDVI saturates in thick canopy — once the crop closes in, everything reads 'healthy' and the map stops separating good from great. NDRE uses the red-edge band instead, and keeps differentiating well into dense corn and soybeans. Practical rule: NDVI early season and in open canopy, NDRE for mid-season and late-season decisions like nitrogen top-dress in tall corn. We fly both bands on the same pass, so you're not choosing at booking time.
- How much does mapping cost?
- NDVI crop health mapping is $7/acre, NDRE $8/acre, and RGB orthomosaics $5/acre — with a $250 per-field minimum, since a small field takes nearly as much planning and processing as a big one. Prescription map sets are a flat $250 per field set whatever the acreage, and seasonal scouting plans start at $200/month. Multiple fields flown on the same trip share one minimum. Our full rate card is published on the pricing page — we're the only drone operator in Alabama that publishes one.
- Are you licensed and insured?
- Yes. Flights are flown by an FAA-licensed private pilot holding a Part 107 remote pilot certificate and a Master's degree in Uncrewed & Autonomous Aircraft Systems, with liability insurance on every flight. We do not currently hold FAA Part 137 authority or an Alabama aerial applicator license — those cover pesticide application, which we don't do yet and don't advertise. Ask for current certificate numbers any time; a legitimate operator will always show you, including which ones they don't have.
- Isn't satellite imagery free? Why pay for a drone flight?
- Free satellite imagery is genuinely useful, and if it's answering your questions you should keep using it. Where it falls down: resolution is typically 10 meters per pixel — one pixel covers a quarter acre, so a 40-foot bad spot disappears entirely — and revisit timing is fixed, so a cloudy week costs you the image you needed. We fly under the clouds, on your schedule, at sub-inch resolution. On a big uniform field, satellite is often enough. On broken 40-acre bottoms where the problem is smaller than a satellite pixel, it isn't.
- What do I actually receive, and in what format?
- Georeferenced index maps (NDVI, NDRE, and others on request), a management-zone classification, the underlying imagery, and a written plain-English interpretation. Files come as GeoTIFF, shapefile (.shp), and .kml plus a PDF summary, and prescription sets export in the formats your equipment reads — John Deere GreenStar, Climate FieldView, Trimble GFX/CFX, and AgLeader .RX. Everything lands in your client portal, where you can download the report or pull the raw images, and it stays there for season-over-season comparison.
- How fast do I get the maps back?
- Within 48 hours of the flight, usually sooner. The flight itself is quick — roughly 20 minutes per 40 acres — and the time goes into processing and interpretation. If you're up against a decision deadline (a fungicide window, a top-dress call), say so when you book and we'll prioritize the turnaround.
- Do I need variable-rate equipment for this to be worth it?
- No, but it changes what you get out of it. Without VR capability, the value is knowing where to scout, where to soil sample, where to adjust manually, and what to document for a landlord or insurer. With VR capability, the prescription file turns the map directly into differential rates and the input savings become measurable. Plenty of customers start in the first category and move to the second — and your co-op or custom applicator may already run prescription files even if your own equipment doesn't.
- Can you work small, hilly, or oddly shaped fields?
- That's exactly what we're built for. There's no field entry at all — no ruts, no compaction, no waiting on the ground to dry — and no minimum acreage a satellite or a plane would need to justify a pass. Terrain, tree lines, and irregular boundaries are routine. The $250 field minimum is the only practical floor, and multiple small fields on one trip share it.
- What weather do you need to fly?
- Mapping is pickier about conditions than most people expect. We want a high sun (roughly 10am–2pm), consistent light, and wind under about 15 mph. Broken clouds are the real enemy — shadows moving across a field mid-flight corrupt the imagery, which is why a partly cloudy day can be worse than an overcast one. We'd rather move your flight a day than hand you a map you can't trust.
- Do you serve my county?
- Our everyday zone covers St. Clair, Calhoun, Etowah, Cleburne, Talladega, Coosa, Jefferson, Shelby, and Blount counties from our Pell City base — but that's a service area, not a fence. For the right acreage we travel well beyond it; Huntsville isn't out of the question. Ask, and we'll give you a straight answer on the trip.
- When should I book?
- For a single diagnostic flight, a week's notice usually gets you a good weather window. For decision-driven imagery — pre-fungicide, pre-top-dress — book two to three weeks out so we can pick the right day inside your window rather than the only day left. Scouting-plan customers get scheduled first when weather compresses everyone into the same two clear afternoons.
Question we didn't cover?
Ask the pilot directly — you'll get a straight answer, even if the answer is 'a drone isn't the right tool for that.'