What Three Years of Beck's PFR Drone Trials Actually Show

There is a lot of noise around spray drones right now, most of it from people selling them. I sell them too, so take that into account. But the reason I fly one instead of a helicopter isn't a brochure claim — it's what independent trial data has been saying for three years.

Beck's Hybrids just closed out the third year of their fungicide application study. Here's what it shows, including the parts that don't help my case.

What PFR Is, and Why Their Bar Matters

Beck's Practical Farm Research is their own on-farm trial program. What makes it worth reading is the standard they set before they'll put their name on a result.

Clayton Stufflebeam, a PFR agronomist with Beck's, describes the PFR Proven label as applying to anything "tested in our research at multi-locations, with at least three locations in that data set, and has provided a positive yield gain and an average positive return on investment" (Brownfield Ag News).

That is a meaningfully different thing from a manufacturer press release. A single season at a single site, in a year that happened to cooperate, will produce whatever number you want. Multiple locations, repeated years, and a requirement that the average return actually be positive — that filters out a lot.

The Three-Year Headline

With three years of data complete, Beck's 2025 PFR Book puts the multi-location corn fungicide ROI at:

• Drone — $13.17 per acre
• Ground rig — $8.44 per acre
• Airplane — $3.13 per acre

Drone fungicide application on corn is now PFR Proven.

Worth noting what the drone was working with: 2 gallons per acre of carrier, the same as the plane, against 15 to 20 GPA for the ground rig. It produced the best return while putting out a fraction of the water.

Why It Works

Two explanations come out of Beck's agronomists, and neither is complicated.

Concentration. Fewer droplets carrying a higher concentration of active ingredient. Aaron Carmer, a PFR location lead, pointed to the "higher fungicide concentration found in the fewer droplets from the drone" as a likely reason it performs (AgriNews). The downdraft also pushes material into the canopy rather than letting it sit on top.

Nothing touches the crop. A ground rig at R1 is driving through chest-high corn. Tires and the underframe brush plants down the length of every pass. That damage doesn't show up as a line item, but it comes out of the same yield you're spraying to protect. A drone doesn't have tires.

The Part That Doesn't Help My Case

Beck's flagged real limitations, and they deserve to be read as carefully as the ROI number.

In the first year of the study, none of the testing locations experienced much disease pressure. The applications were also all made in the morning with dew on the leaves, which Beck's noted likely helped compensate for the drone's lower carrier rate. Their own conclusion at the time: "This was a first-year study, and additional years of research and data are needed before making recommendations" (Beck's PFR, 2023 study).

Two things follow from that.

First, dew on the leaf is not a small detail. If part of what made 2 GPA work was moisture already sitting on the plant, then time of day is doing some of the work the aircraft is getting credit for.

Second, and more important: none of this pays without disease. University of Illinois trials across 45 Illinois environments found fungicide on corn returned 9.5 bu/ac where disease affected at least 10% of leaf area, but only 2.8 bu/ac where it didn't (farmdoc). No application method fixes a field that didn't need spraying. The best ROI in the world on a pass you shouldn't have made is still a loss.

So the honest version is: in a year with pressure, a drone looks like the most profitable way to put fungicide on corn. In a clean year, the cheapest decision is not to spray at all, and anybody telling you different is selling something.

The Pilot Matters

Here's the part the ROI table doesn't capture.

Those numbers came from someone flying the aircraft correctly. Right height, right speed, right nozzles, right conditions, calibrated. Change any of those and the result changes with it — a drone flown badly will underperform a ground rig run well, every time.

The aircraft is a tool. At 2 gallons per acre there is very little margin for error, and the margin that exists is the operator's judgment: whether the wind is right, whether the timing is right, whether the field needs the pass at all.

I spent nine years in the Army, most of it in EOD, where the standard was getting it right the first time. After that I went to flight school and spent years in aerial application before I ever touched a drone. The equipment changed. The part where you have to know what you're doing didn't.

If You Want to Talk About It

If you're deciding whether to put fungicide on this year, I'd rather walk your fields and tell you honestly whether it's worth it than sell you a pass you don't need.

And if you're thinking about buying a drone and running your own acres, I sell the same aircraft I fly commercially — so you'll get an answer based on operating one for a living instead of a spec sheet.

Either way, call 630-465-4539.

Premium Ag Services is not affiliated with Beck's Hybrids and had no involvement in the PFR trials described here. All figures are linked to their sources above.