The green thumb gene must have skipped a generation, because I’d have trouble keeping a cactus alive, let alone a green field of soybeans. Many farmers would likely be in the same predicament if they didn’t use the services of ag pilots, colloquially known as crop dusters.
If you’ve never seen an ag sprayer service a field, you’ve missed out on an aerial ballet of low and fast flight coupled with attack angles approaching the best aerobatic pilots in the world while the pilot dodges power lines, cell phone towers, and other obstructions. That and the geometric precision of covering acreage in minutes rather than the hours it would take using conventional methods is the hallmark of aerial ag companies and their pilots.
Long gone are the days when the seasoned scrappy pilot loaded up some pesticide, climbed aboard his radial engine biplane with crop dusting spray arms, and took to the fields like a bear to a picnic basket. And while that tactic worked to some degree decades ago, in today’s high-tech world, there is a better and safer way to spray that field…