Drone Aerial Application in Northern Illinois
Precision spraying and seeding by drone. Fungicide, herbicide, foliar products, and cover crops — applied without putting a tire in your field.
Premium Ag Services operates out of Newark, Illinois, serving Kendall, LaSalle, Grundy, DeKalb, Kane, Will, and surrounding counties.
What we apply
- Fungicide — tasseling and R1 corn, soybean applications
- Herbicide — including spot and targeted work
- Foliar nutrients and biologicals
- Cover crop seeding — interseeding into standing corn and soybeans
Why drone application
Acres are acres. A drone doesn't slow down for field size. We work off the field edge with batteries and product staged on site — no ferrying back to an airstrip, no waiting on a tender across the county. Large blocks are the most efficient work we do, and they're priced accordingly: the more acres you put together, the better the per-acre number. When a job needs more capacity, we add aircraft — multiple drones working the same field at the same time.
No tracks. A ground rig running through tasseled corn costs you yield in the wheel tracks and in the plants the boom brushes past. A drone doesn't touch the crop. Across a big block, that's a meaningful number of bushels you keep.
Wet ground and tight windows. The right time to spray is often the time you can't get a rig in the field. Drones fly ground that's too soft to drive and get into fields that would rut for the rest of the season — which matters most when you've got a lot of acres and a narrow window to cover them.
And the awkward acres too. Point rows, waterways, terraces, irregular corners, and ground tucked behind timber get sprayed on the same pass, at the same rate, without bringing in a second piece of equipment.
Nobody is in the aircraft
I say this as someone who used to fly the other kind. Agricultural aviation is among the most dangerous flying in the country, and it isn't close.
The National Transportation Safety Board counted 802 agricultural operations accidents between 2001 and 2010, including 81 fatal ones. In 2013 alone it investigated 78 accidents; nine were fatal and ten people were killed. Ag operations rank sixth or seventh among general aviation sectors by hours flown — but third by number of accidents.
The leading cause isn't weather or engine failure. It's wires — power lines, guy wires and towers that are nearly invisible from the air at application speed. In the industry's own survey, operators rated those above every other hazard.
A wire strike in a manned aircraft kills a pilot. A wire strike here costs me a drone.
Everything else about doing this work properly still applies — the drift, the rates, the timing, knowing when to shut down and come back tomorrow. But the worst outcome available is different. And when we scale up to cover more acres, we add airframes, not people at fifteen feet looking for wires.
No field is worth a life — read the full piece →
The economics
Fungicide is cheap insurance, and most years it pays for itself.
The averages understate it. University of Illinois trials across 45 Illinois environments found an average response of 5.3 bushels per acre, but that number hides the shape of it: 9.5 bushels where disease affected 10% or more of leaf area, 2.8 where pressure was low (farmdoc). Pioneer's on-farm trials — over 2,000 of them across 14 years — averaged 7.4 bushels, with responses over 20 bushels not uncommon when disease pressure was high (Pioneer agronomy).
That's how insurance works. Small premium, occasional large payout, and you don't know in July which kind of year you're in. Catch a tar spot or gray leaf spot year with a clean field and the fungicide pass paid for itself several times over.
What moves the math most is the cost of getting it on. Break-even sits around 5 or 6 bushels at typical application cost — so a cheaper, more effective application means it pencils more often. That's where the drone earns its keep: Beck's three-year PFR data put drone fungicide application at a $13.17 per-acre return against $8.44 for a ground rig and $3.13 for airplane, with no wheel tracks taken out of the field on top of it. Those figures come from Beck's 2025 PFR Book.
Beck's ran that study three seasons running across multiple locations, and drone fungicide application on corn now carries their PFR Proven designation. Their agronomist Clayton Stufflebeam describes that bar 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's their data, not ours. Read the full breakdown.
Who's Flying It
I'm Erik. I've spent more than a decade in aerial application, starting in manned aircraft long before I ever flew a spray drone.
I've flown crops from helicopters, spent time flying medical helicopters, and eventually built Premium Ag Services around the same work I've done most of my career: putting an aircraft to work and getting the job done right.
I didn't get into aerial application because of drones. I got into drones because, after years of aerial application, they became the better tool for a lot of the work I was already doing.
Today I fly the same EAVision aircraft we sell. If I'm recommending one for your operation, it's because I've used it on mine.
Pricing
Per-acre, starting at $13, with volume pricing on larger blocks and whole-farm work. Call with your acres and we'll give you a number.
Book an application
Work with your agronomist or retailer on the product and timing. Tell us the field, the acres, the product, and when it needs to go on, and we'll tell you straight whether we can do it and what it'll cost.
Every job comes with an as-applied record — where we flew, what went out, and at what rate. Your agronomist wants it, and so does your insurance.
630-465-4539 · erik.simmons@premiumagservices.com
Serving roughly 100 miles from Newark, Illinois — and farther when it makes sense.