1,850 acres. One season. An 11% yield lift.
How Sunridge Farms — a family-run cotton and alfalfa operation west of Phoenix — used FieldSight AI to replace blanket spraying with surgical interventions, cut input spend by 28%, and give three scouts their weeks back.
Sunridge Farms
- Location
- Buckeye, AZ
- Acreage
- 1,850 acres
- Crops
- Cotton, Alfalfa
- Ownership
- Family, 3rd gen
- Prior tooling
- Paper scouting
- Plan
- Professional
Rising input costs, shrinking scouting bandwidth.
Coming out of 2024, Sunridge was on the wrong side of every trend. Fertilizer prices were up, labor was thinner, and blanket applications were burning cash on acres that didn't need them. Owner-operator Marisol Vega needed a way to see the whole farm without walking the whole farm.
- Blanket spraying across 1,850 acres regardless of actual pressure
- 3 full-time scouts spending 30+ hours/week walking fields
- Late detection of irrigation failures — often only visible at harvest
- No historical zone-level data to guide variable-rate applications
- Rising input costs eating into per-acre margins year over year
Weekly drone scans + continuous satellite + AI alerts.
Sunridge subscribed to the Professional plan. A licensed FieldSight AI drone technician flew all 14 fields weekly for high-resolution multispectral imagery. Between flights, satellite passes flagged emerging anomalies, and the AI layer pushed alerts by SMS the moment something crossed threshold.
Weekly RGB imagery, centimeter-scale resolution
Continuous RGB trend detection between visits
SMS + dashboard notifications with location + severity
Six inflection points across one growing season.
- Week 0
Onboarding & field mapping
Sunridge uploaded boundaries for 14 fields totaling 1,850 acres. FieldSight AI ingested crop type, planting dates, and historic yield maps. Baseline RGB imagery captured within 48 hours.
- Week 3
First early-detection win
Satellite differential flagged a 6-acre RGB anomaly in a pivot corner. Weekly drone pass confirmed early-stage aphid pressure. Spot treatment on 6 acres replaced a planned 220-acre blanket spray.
- Week 7
Irrigation anomaly
Thermal + RGB fusion surfaced a clogged sprinkler head causing a dry wedge invisible from the road. Repair inside 24 hours prevented an estimated 4% yield loss in the affected field.
- Week 12
Variable-rate nitrogen
AI-generated prescription maps directed a second-side-dress only to under-performing zones. Total urea applied dropped 31% versus the operation's standard flat rate.
- Week 18
Disease hot spot
Alfalfa leaf spot detected 3 days before scouts would have noticed. Targeted fungicide on 40 acres avoided a full-farm application and preserved cutting quality.
- Harvest
Yield validation
Combine yield monitors confirmed an 11% blended lift over the same fields in 2024. Zones with the most FieldSight AI-triggered interventions carried the largest gains.
The delta, line by line.
"We stopped guessing. The alert came in Tuesday morning, we walked straight to the corner of Pivot 4, and it was exactly what the app said. That one catch paid for the whole year."
The math on a single season.
Net-positive by month two. By harvest, Sunridge's FieldSight AI subscription returned an estimated 4.2x — before accounting for the improved decision confidence Marisol says is "hard to put a number on."
Run the same play on your acreage.
Month-to-month. No lock-in. Pick a plan or talk to us about a rollout sized to your operation.