What Three Illinois Spray Drone Operators Actually Fly

Ag spray drones have moved from novelty to revenue stream in the U.S. Corn Belt, and the operators flying them have strong opinions about which platforms hold up over a full season. Prairie Farmer recently spoke with three Illinois custom operators about the aircraft and trailers they actually run. Their answers line up around two brands and three workhorses: the DJI Agras T50, the older T40, and the EAVision J-150.

Three Illinois operators, three approaches

Klaytin Hunsinger runs Hunsinger Ag Solutions out of Rossville, Illinois. He sprays and scouts with drones, sells drones as a dealer, and moves seed on the side. Gary and Alec Wenger operate No Trax Precision Ag from Rushville, Illinois, alongside their Wenger Ag Solutions retail business in seed, feed, fungicide, and seed treatment. Ben Bremmer co-owns Spring Valley Aviation LLC in Pearl City, Illinois, with two brothers and two cousins.

All three started after 2023, which is to say all three came up during the same window that turned spray drones into a real custom-application category. Each one settled on a different aircraft for different reasons.

Three drones doing the work

Hunsinger flies an EAVision J-150 in 2026 after running a DJI Agras T40 when he started in 2023. He picked the J-150 for parts availability, the 45,000 mAh main battery, the lidar suite, and the 20-gallon (75.7-liter) tank. He also called out one operational feature that matters in the field: the J-150 lets a pilot stop midfield and change spray direction when the wind shifts.

The Wengers run three DJI Agras T50s. They moved off the T40 after the T50 launched, citing fixed software issues, better efficiency, and a friendlier operator workflow. Bremmer flies two T50s as well. He wanted a tested aircraft and went with the T50 after roughly six months of field validation on the platform.

What each platform actually carries

The DJI Agras T50, the dominant aircraft in this group, runs DJI’s coaxial twin-rotor design with a 40-liter (10.5-gallon) spray tank and a 50-kilogram (110-lb) granule load for spreading work. Its dual atomizing spray system pushes up to 16 liters per minute, and an optional centrifugal nozzle pair can take total flow to roughly 24 liters per minute. Droplet size is adjustable between 50 and 500 microns. Sensing comes from front and rear phased-array radars plus a binocular vision system.

The DJI Agras T40, still flying with Hunsinger as recently as 2023 and widely operated across the region, shares the 40-liter tank and the coaxial twin-rotor architecture with the older spray and sensing stack. DJI rates it at about 52 acres per flight hour, with an active phased-array radar reaching roughly 164 feet (50 m).

The EAVision J-150 takes a different approach. It carries a 20-gallon (75.7-liter) tank, the largest of the three by a meaningful margin, and pushes 40 liters per minute of flow. Sensing is lidar-first, with dual forward lidar units, dual phased-array radar, and a 360-degree millimeter-wave radar for night work.

The 45,000 mAh battery Hunsinger pointed to pairs with a 13,000-watt charger that EAVision says recharges from 20 percent in under nine minutes.

Lidar is a wonderful piece of tech, and useful for every kind of pilot. Vision sensors need at least some light to work. Lidar fires lasers, so it works in any light condition — or, more accurately, in any lack of it. When your aircraft costs north of $20,000, avoiding accidents stops being a preference and becomes the whole job.

Trailers and acreage tell the real story

As Farm Progress reported, Hunsinger designed his own trailer system, the Drone Deck, which he now builds and sells through Hunsinger Ag Solutions. It runs a 20-foot bottom deck and a 32-foot upper deck and is removable so the trailer can pull other duty during the off-season. He charges $22,000 for the composite-deck version and $18,000 for the wood-deck version, and says he cannot keep up with demand.

The Wengers built two trailers themselves. The main rig is a 22-foot custom gooseneck with a deck on top, two 400-gallon tanks (one for clean water, one for mixed chemicals), a generator, eight batteries, and a three-person crew of two pilots and one observer.

Running both drones and the support gear at deck level cuts turnaround time on landings, battery swaps, and refills. A smaller secondary trailer with a single 400-gallon tank handles outlying fields and ditch work.

Bremmer flies off a 26-foot double-deck gooseneck with seven-foot landing wings on both sides. He bought the trailer and did the electrical and plumbing himself, fitting clean water tanks, mixed-product tanks, and an agitation system tuned for fungicide.

The acreage numbers tell their own story. Hunsinger went from 5,500 acres in 2023 with one drone to roughly 10,000 acres this year with two, and is on track to sell about 20 drones through his dealership. The Wengers grew from two drones in 2023 to three, with about 15,000 acres planned this season, primarily fungicide. Bremmer’s team covered 7,500 acres last year on two T50s and is aiming for 10,000 acres this year.

DroneXL’s Take

Is the ag world about to live through its own version of the Skydio versus DJI fight? A year ago, no serious sprayer would have walked away from a DJI Agras. Today, one of these operators did exactly that, and he is not regretting it.

There is a second point worth sitting with. Custom drone spraying is one of the most profitable small businesses almost anyone in the United States can stand up right now. The barrier is real but not insurmountable, and the unit economics line up if you put in the hours.

The bigger picture is the one most people miss. Thanks to these aircraft, the same field gets covered faster, with less chemical, and with a pilot whose feet never leave the ground. That kind of progress is harder to put on a slide deck than a horsepower number, but it is the change that actually moves the trade forward.

Photo credit: EA Vision, DJI, Ben Bremmer, Gary and Alec Wenger, Klaytin Hunsinger.