Matthew J. Grassi’s Post

If the point of the question is related to the 80/20 distribution, I agree with Nathan Faleide opinion below: it has as much to do with specific question posed as anything. Much like cable and internet, a significant portion of farmer remote viewing subscriptions are bundled in other services, obfuscating unit rev and unit cost for the service. In fact, I'd bet that a significant portion of the retailers really don't know, b/c the service was "bundled" by the retailers supplier. Matthew J. Grassi...Maybe a more probing question is Nathan's below: "Does the use of imagery help you in your agronomic decisions, sales effort, and/or both?” Or an even more useful question: Think farmers will ever tire of the patronizing approach to ag data adoption? Photo-shopped yield maps may improve farmer ego, but doubt it does much for finding opportunities for improvement.

Matthew J. Grassi from my perspective this makes sense if they are only offering imagery.  This would apply not only for UAS services but also satellite imagery or manned aircraft.  If you don't offer a solution all you are selling is a picture.  If that's all they want then you can make money, otherwise you need to infuse that data with agronomy to make it something of value.  Just look what Michael Dunn, CCA, SSp has been able to do for his clients.

One large issue is that many just sell or promote it as a pretty picture or for some unrealistic non-scalable actions like plant stand counts, viewing tire tracks, individual nozzle detection issues, or weed/disease prediction. While possible, it’s hard, spendy, and time consuming on an ag retailer scale. Most don’t turn imagery into simple actionable insights or use it with other datasets to create a better understanding of how the crop ebbs and flows to create better RX maps. In the end, imagery is still confusing to most with the multiple indexes, timings, and resolutions and a lack of proper education is still evident throughout the industry. To put it simply, most don’t know how to make money from it and it’s becoming cheap enough to basically give away which reduces its appeal of a worthy dataset to all. Faster distribution with better actionable insights from simpler scalable datasets at affordable prices is needed. It’s getting better, slowly.

Matt, I definitely have thoughts. I would love to talk before you go to print.  I will PM you.