Feature

By Rachel Witte

Scout the field, track crop development, compare observed pest pressure against established economic thresholds and treat only when and where the population justifies the cost of intervention. What has changed is the scale and resolution at which that scouting can happen, and the precision with which a response can be targeted.

Drone technology and variable-rate application systems are the latest tools to enter this framework. For operations managing significant acreage, they offer a way to gather better information faster and to act on it more precisely. Whether the investment makes sense depends on the operation, but understanding what the tools actually do— and where they fit within an IPM approach— is a useful starting point.

Scouting as the Foundation

IPM begins with monitoring, and monitoring begins with knowing what to look for and when. Crop development stage matters as much as pest presence: a corn rootworm population that would cause negligible damage at one growth stage can be far more significant at another. Tracking growing degree days and crop progress alongside pest populations is what allows threshold-based decisions to be meaningful.

Traditional scouting by walking transects, checking representative plant samples and recording counts remains the most reliable method for many pest and disease situations. Its limitation is coverage. A thorough scout on a large field takes significant time, and pest pressure can develop unevenly across hundreds of acres in ways that a standard transect pattern may not fully capture.

This is where aerial scouting tools have found a practical role. A drone equipped with multispectral sensors can cover large acreage quickly and flag anomalies, including areas of crop stress, unusual reflectance patterns or visible canopy gaps,

8 | 800-247-2000 | 515-955-1600 | May 2026