Land as kin
I'm on your ground for an hour and then I'm gone. What I did there stays. So I plan each job around the state the field will be in afterward: more ground cover and more life in the soil than when I showed up.
Our own farm is our first customer.
My family runs Three Waters Farm (opens in a new tab) in Ghent (opens in a new tab). It's certified organic, with grass-fed cattle, sheep, laying hens, a donkey and open fields, and it's our home, so it's an estate as well as a farm. Its solar array is big enough that keeping it clean is a real job. Everything on this site gets used on my own place before I offer it to yours.
Tim Piastrelli · Founder and pilot
What I won't trade away
Six things that decide which jobs I take and how I work your ground.
Soil health
This is why I fly application instead of driving it. A loaded ground sprayer puts tons of steel on soft ground, and the compaction it leaves takes years to work back out. The T100 only sets down where we load it, never out across your field, and GPS-guided placement means less product over the same acres. I probably care about this more than a drone operator needs to, but I'm trying to rebuild soil on my own place, so I know what undoes it.
Organic first
My farm is certified organic, so I know what that line costs to hold. On your ground, organic is where I start. Most jobs stay organic. When one can't, because your window is too short, I'll tell you before we fly what it would take instead, a conventional fertilizer or conventional seed, and you decide. It's your crop. I'm not going to hold a principle on your behalf and leave you to eat the loss for it.
Nothing wasted
At home, nose to tail is literal. We sell the beef, render the tallow into balm, and spin the wool off our sheep into yarn. An animal died for that, and throwing the rest away isn't something I can square. On your ground the same instinct means matching the rate to what the field shows, so nothing goes where it isn't needed.
Trust first
Our farm stand sits out at the road from late April through October, open whatever the hour, with nobody in it. Eggs, raw honey from our hives, syrup off our own maples, flowers, whatever else is coming in that week. You take what you want and leave what you owe. I'd rather deal with people the same way in the flying. I take you at your word, and if something goes sideways, I pick up the phone.
No shortcuts
Our ground has been farmed since 1860 and we're only a few years into trying to put it right. I'm still learning most of it, with a lot of help from people who have been at it far longer than me. Soil comes back over years. A herd takes generations. Nothing I fly over your place changes either of those, and I won't sell you a drone as a shortcut. What a drone can do is keep the record: the same fence line and the same count, flown season after season.