Drone Spraying in Kane County, Illinois
I grew up in Big Rock and went to high school at Hinckley-Big Rock. Sugar Grove, Kaneville and Elburn are a short run from our shop in Newark.
Fungicide, herbicide, foliar nutrients and cover crop seeding applied by drone, from $13 an acre. Veteran-owned, FAA Part 137 certified.
The ground we're talking about
Kane is the county where farming is under the most pressure, and the numbers are blunt about it. Between the 2017 and 2022 Censuses of Agriculture the county lost 16 percent of its farms and 14 percent of its farmland. What is left is 509 farms working 146,717 acres, with 138,648 acres of cropland and the smallest average farm size in our service area at 288 acres.
You can see it from the road. West of Aurora and Elburn the ground is still farmed hard, but the field boundaries are set by subdivisions, forest preserve and the Metra line as much as by the soil.
Where we fly
Big Rock, Sugar Grove, Kaneville, Elburn, Maple Park, Virgil, Plato Center, Burlington, Hampshire and the ground west of Aurora.
Why a drone works on this ground
This is the county drones were made for. Smaller fields, more edges, more neighbours. A plane needs room to work and a clean approach; a ground rig needs the field to be dry and the corn to be short. A drone flies at fifteen feet with the droplet size set before takeoff, follows a mapped boundary, and shuts off where the map says to.
Spraying with houses on the other side of the fence. When a 288-acre average is squeezed between developments, drift stops being an abstraction. We set droplet size on the ground rather than guessing at it, and if conditions are not right we will tell you and come back. That is true anywhere — it just matters more here.
Awkward acres are not a surcharge. Point rows, waterways, terraces, the corner behind the timber and the strip along the creek all get treated on the same pass at the same rate. In a county with this many edges, that is most of the job.
What we apply
- Fungicide — tasseling and R1 corn, and soybean applications
- Herbicide — including spot and targeted work
- Foliar nutrients and biologicals
- Cover crop seeding — interseeded into standing corn and soybeans
What it costs
Per acre, starting at $13, with volume pricing on larger blocks and whole-farm work. Most applications land between $13 and $15 depending on product, rate and field layout. Smaller and more awkward fields are the work we are built for, so ask rather than assuming you are too small to be worth a call.
Every job comes with an as-applied record: where we flew, what went out and at what rate.
Book an application
Tell us the field, the acres, the product and when it needs to go on, and we will tell you straight whether we can do it and what it will cost.
630-465-4539 · [email]
Premium Ag Services is a veteran-owned agricultural business at 16100 Newark Rd, Newark, Illinois. We also serve Kendall, DeKalb and the surrounding counties.