Automation Workflow for Coordinating Ground Crews to Confirmed Disease Hotspots

Manual processes of downloading maps, calling crews, and explaining locations create a 2-5 day delay, during which disease can spread across 10-15% of a field. This automated workflow ingests geotagged drone confirmations and dispatches digital work orders to crew mobile apps in under 30 minutes, containing the outbreak before it escalates, protecting yield and reducing the acreage requiring expensive fungicide treatment.

Manually planning daily routes for multiple crews across thousands of acres is inefficient, leading to wasted travel time and missed high-priority zones. The workflow's orchestration layer uses real-time location, field access points, and task priority to dynamically optimize routes. This reduces non-productive windshield time by 25-40%, allowing the same crew to cover more critical acres per day and lowering operational cost per treated acre.

Verbal instructions and paper maps lead to crews scouting the wrong field, missing the specific hotspot, or applying the incorrect treatment rate. This workflow provides crews with a locked, GPS-navigable polygon on their mobile device, along with field notes (e.g., 'gate code 4451, avoid wet corner'). Digital confirmation of arrival, scouting notes, and treatment application creates an auditable trail, eliminating costly mistakes and re-sprays.

Blanket spraying an entire field when only 5-10% is infected wastes 90-95% of fungicide cost. By routing crews only to confirmed, geofenced hotspots, the workflow ensures expensive chemicals are applied only where needed. This precision targeting can reduce fungicide volume by 70%+ on a per-event basis, directly improving margin and supporting sustainability goals, while maintaining or improving disease control efficacy.

Manual logs for pesticide application, organic certification, and insurance claims are prone to gaps and inaccuracies. This workflow automatically generates a compliance package for each intervention: timestamped drone confirmation, the dispatched prescription map, GPS-tracked application path from the sprayer, and digital crew sign-off. This immutable record streamlines regulatory audits, supports ESG reporting, and accelerates insurance claims processing with verified evidence.

Managing 10x the acreage typically requires 10x the administrative coordination. This workflow acts as a force multiplier. The automated orchestration layer—integrating with platforms like John Deere Operations Center or FarmERP—handles task prioritization, dispatch, and verification. This allows one farm manager to effectively coordinate responses across a dispersed portfolio, enabling geographic expansion or the management of more leased ground without proportionally increasing overhead staff.

The workflow ingests geotagged disease confirmations (polygons, severity scores) from the drone vision pipeline via API. An orchestration agent immediately scores each alert based on pathogen aggressiveness, crop value, and proximity to other hotspots to create a dynamic priority queue for dispatch. This eliminates manual triage and ensures the most economically threatening issues are addressed first.

A dispatch agent pulls high-priority alerts and generates detailed work orders in the crew's mobile field app (e.g., Trimble, custom React Native). It optimizes routing for multiple crews based on real-time location, equipment type, and field access points, minimizing windshield time. The order includes the detection imagery, GPS boundaries, recommended scouting protocol, and any safety notes (e.g., recent chemical applications).

To prevent miscommunication, the workflow automatically attaches relevant field data layers to each work order by querying the farm ERP (e.g., John Deere Operations Center, SAP Agri). This includes current hybrid, soil type, last application details, and landowner contact. It also checks and communicates gate codes or access permissions stored in the farm management platform, ensuring crews can enter without delay.

Upon arrival, the ground scout uses the mobile app to confirm location, add ground-truth photos/notes, and mark the task as completed, scouted, or requiring escalation. This digital confirmation, timestamped and geotagged, closes the loop in the system. Any exceptions (e.g., mis-identification, need for spray) are automatically routed as new tasks—either back to the agronomist for diagnosis or to the spray crew queue with updated prescription maps.

A monitoring dashboard tracks KPIs like average response time, confirmation rate, and travel efficiency per crew, enabling performance management. Simultaneously, system health agents monitor the entire pipeline—from alert ingestion to confirmation—for failures or delays, triggering alerts to DevOps if API calls fail or mobile devices go offline, ensuring operational reliability.

For confirmations requiring spray, the workflow automatically generates a precision prescription map (ISO-XML or shapefile) from the updated ground-truth data. This map is pushed directly to the designated sprayer's console (Raven, Trimble) and a copy is logged with timestamps, product rates, and applicator ID into a compliance database (e.g., for state pesticide reporting or sustainability certification), creating a fully automated, audit-ready record.