The Waitress Came Back Five Times

Last month, I sat down for lunch with a guy named Jake Lund from Harvest Drone. The waitress came back five times. We never looked at the menu. Pretty sure she thought we were either planning a bank heist or falling in love.

We were doing neither. We were trying to figure out if we were building the same puzzle or just two guys who had a good conversation.

I'm telling you this because on March 13 in Detroit Lakes, you can find out what we figured out. And more importantly, you can find out if any of it is worth a damn on your farm.

DL AgTech 2026. March 13. 10 am. The Lodge in Detroit Lakes. Free lunch. Under 20 seats left.

Register here: goharvestdrone.com/dl-agtech-2026

This isn't a trade show. It's not a co-op meeting where somebody's PowerPoint has seventeen slides about company values before they get to anything useful. There are three of us in the room, and we all have skin in the game on what we're showing you.

Alec Marxen from Sound Agriculture goes from 10:15 to 11. He's a farmer and regional sales manager in central Minnesota. He's not going to tell you biologicals are the future of agriculture. He's going to show you data and let you do the math.

I go from 11:15 to noon. I'm going to walk through the fertility math on our acres, including what urea spiked to this week and what that does to your cost per pound of nitrogen. I'll show you how Source DC stacks against that number and where I've seen it fail.

But the bigger piece is Earth Optics. I'll walk through what the scan actually finds: compaction, pathogen load, soil biology, and what it's already told some guys to stop buying.

First example I'll show is soybean inoculant. If the scan shows Bradyrhizobium japonicum is already abundant in your soil, you've been paying $3-5/acre for something your ground doesn’t need.

The whole thesis of the talk is four words: know before you spend.

Jake and the Harvest Drone team take 1 to 2 pm. They're running Hylio drones, American-made, and you'll see the equipment up close. Ask real questions. Get real answers on timing, cost, and whether drone application actually pencils out for your operation.

If you're thinking about drone application this spring, the time to have that conversation is before the window opens, not during it.

Two Scheels gift card drawings. $250 each. One at 10, one at 2. You have to be present to win, which is a good reason to stick around for the whole thing.

I walked away from drones in 2020. Flew them starting in 2018, got FAA licensed, made maps, measured mistakes, told myself it was precision ag. It wasn't. The data was interesting, the maps were cool, and the practical use cases were pretty thin. Didn't pencil, so I hung it up.

What changed is that the use case matured. Fungicide timing. In-season foliar applications. Cover crop seeding. Variable rate work in a two-week window when a ground rig can't get in. That's a different conversation from making pretty maps.

Jake is building infrastructure, not just chasing acres. Pilots, mechanics, and a model that doesn't require you to figure out the equipment side yourself. That's what caught my attention at that lunch we forgot to eat.

Barge urea jumped $82 a ton this week. I got the tip from a Snapchat group. I can't verify it independently, but it tracks with what I'm hearing elsewhere. Retail will vary. Run it at $680, and the math still moves.

Urea is 46% nitrogen. $700 divided by 2,000, then divided by .46, comes to 76 cents per pound of actual nitrogen.

I'll walk through what that does to the Source DC calculation in Detroit Lakes. If you want the full breakdown now, I put a video up this week.

March 13. Detroit Lakes. Under 20 seats.

Free lunch. This time we're ordering.

goharvestdrone.com/dl-agtech-2026

Questions? Call Jake directly: 218-255-9111

Proudly put together by Harvest Drone, True Grit Agronomy, and Sound Agriculture.