Drone NDVI & NDRE Crop Monitoring — Real-Time Decisions

Stop guessing where your crop is struggling. A single drone flight gives you a 3cm-resolution map of every field — showing nitrogen stress, disease hotspots, and canopy variation before they become yield losses.

What we measure

• NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index) — crop biomass and canopy density. Shows where establishment is poor or stress is reducing growth.
• NDRE (Normalised Difference Red Edge) — nitrogen status within the canopy. More accurate than NDVI alone for identifying N deficiency, especially at flag leaf.
• Canopy height mapping — identifies lodging risk, tramline issues, and variable establishment.
• Disease hotspot identification — anomalous zones flagged for ground inspection before symptoms spread.

When to fly

We time flights to match your crop’s growth stages, not a calendar date. Recommended timings for winter wheat:

• T0 — pre-emergence / early tillering baseline: establishes the crop variability map for the season
• T1 — main tillering (GS25–30): identifies N-deficient zones before the main N application window closes
• T2 — flag leaf (GS37–39): fine-tunes final N and fungicide decisions; generates PRF1 evidence if variable rate applied

What you receive

• Annotated flight report with NDVI and NDRE maps for each field
• Per-field treatment zones — low, medium, high variability clearly delineated
• Variable rate N prescription map where required (ISOBUS-ready)
• Ground-truth flags — specific locations to walk and inspect
• SFI26 PRF1 documentation where variable rate inputs are applied

Drone versus satellite — a direct comparison