How MAS Seeds Uses Drone Plant Counts for More Efficient Assessment of Field Trials

How MAS Seeds Uses Drone Imagery for More Efficient Assessment of Field Trials

May 07, 2025

Varietal trials are the proving ground for plant genetics. Selecting and refining crop traits and treatments leads to innovations that help growers increase yield, resilience, and overall performance. But these trials require massive data collection and precise analysis—often the biggest bottleneck in scaling research.

MAS Seeds - Breeding for Changing Agriculture

To address this challenge, MAS Seeds, a leading provider of hybrid crops, turned to drone technology to accelerate and improve their field assessments.

As the seed branch of the Maïsadour® Group, MAS Seeds has developed and sold high-quality seed for sustainable agriculture for 75 years. Their extensive trials, spanning over 200 locations in seven countries across Europe, Mexico, and Africa, require thousands of data points to evaluate plant performance.

Traditionally, this data was collected manually, making the process time-consuming, subjective, and difficult to verify—until they partnered with Solvi to integrate drone-based analytics into their research.

Case Study at a Glance

Partner: MAS Seeds
Crops: Corn, sunflowers, alfalfa, oilseed rape, cover crops
Location: Over 200 trial locations in Europe, Mexico, Asia, and Africa
Field Trial Size: From 3 to 20 hectares, from a few hundred up to 10,000 plots per trial
Hardware: DJI Mavic 3 Multispectral
Resolution: 0.5-1 cm/px GSD
Number of Flights: Three to four flights per trial per season

mas_seeds_piloting_drone — Varietal trials drive crop innovation but demand intensive data collection. To overcome this bottleneck, MAS Seeds turned to drone technology to speed up and enhance their field assessments.

Challenges in Traditional Field Trial Assessments

Like all breeders and seed producers, MAS Seeds historically relied on manual field assessments to monitor seed variety performance. This presented several significant challenges:

Time-Consuming & Labor-Intensive: Teams had to walk every field to count plants, assess crop health, measure heights, and track flowering dates—an exhausting and inefficient process that limited trial capacity.
Subjectivity & Inconsistency: Data collection depended on personal judgments from individual field technicians, leading to potential human error and inconsistencies across trials.
Limited Data Verification: Once recorded, data points were difficult (if not impossible) to validate or revisit. Verifying data past a growth stage or off-season was impossible.

Subjectivity is a real liability,” explains Boris Calvet, who manages drone activities and large-scale phenotyping at MAS Seeds. “With manual grading, it’s impossible to know the field standard until you’ve crossed the entire field. So, often, the first evaluations made are incongruent. You either accept the data variability or walk the field again.

Solution: Implementing Drone Imagery for Field Trial Assessments

MAS Seeds began experimenting with drone data collection in 2015. Over time, they’ve refined their approach and now deploy DJI Mavic 3M drones for their superior RGB and multispectral cameras, RTK GPS capabilities, extended flight times, and ease of use.

They pair the Mavic’s high resolution imagery with image stitching and detailed analytics from Solvi. This combination has enhanced MAS Seeds’ field data collection benefiting both employees and customers.

mas_seeds_mavic3m — MAS Seeds started using drone data in 2015 and now relies on DJI Mavic 3M drones for their top-quality cameras, GPS precision, long flights, and user-friendly operation.

1. Faster Data Collection

Image-based plant counts accelerate MAS Seeds’ data collection time from hours to minutes. Low-altitude flights (20m) allow technician pilots to capture high-resolution images of an entire field in just one to two hours. They skip hours on foot and create a nearly immediate snapshot of trial performance without sacrificing accuracy.

The transition to image-based plant counting has transformed our field operations. What once required full days of walking through trial plots now takes just a fraction of that time. We now capture an entire field’s data in one flight, giving us near-instant visibility into trial performance”, says Calvet.

2. Reduced Labor & Increased Research Capacity

The Mavic’s easy-to-use interface enables local technicians to conduct drone flights with basic training. Automated flights eliminate the need for large field crews and allow researchers to focus on data analysis instead of manual collection.

As a result, MAS Seeds has scaled up trials across multiple locations, improving research efficiency and working conditions for research teams without increasing operational costs.

3. Objective & Verifiable Data for Standardized Assessments

Unlike manual observations, drone imagery captures objective, measurable data that can be reviewed at any time.

Researchers can analyze and revisit high-resolution images to validate plant counts, height measurements, or canopy cover assessments – in season or for years to come – ensuring accuracy, consistency and future compatibility across trials.

4. Standardized Remote Data Collection

With global-scale trials, MAS Seeds standardizes drone flight plans so local technicians can fly fields in their respective countries and upload the data for processing. RTK GPS ensures seamless alignment of plot boundaries, and Solvi’s annotation tool allows technicians to communicate location-specific details.

Crop-Specific Drone Applications

MAS Seeds customizes its drone analysis based on the crop type to optimize accuracy:

Corn:
- Plant counts at V3/V4 to assess emergence and seedling vigor
- Additional flights to gauge canopy cover and crop heterogeneity
- Pre-harvest flights to check crop readiness and drying rate.
Sunflower: Head counts to measure days to bloom.
Weeds: Weed mapping to note crop competition and impact.
Empty rows: Skips and empty plots to analyze additional sun exposure impact.

mas_seeds_early_stage_corn_counts — Using Solvi’s PlantAI, MAS Seeds tailors plant counts and analysis for each crop—from corn emergence and sunflower blooming to weed mapping and canopy cover.

Streamlining Data Processing with Solvi

MAS Seeds’ collaboration with Solvi extends beyond drone flights; Solvi’s cloud-based platform enables efficient data processing, organization, and analysis.

Using Solvi, MAS Seeds:

Digitizes and centralizes trial data for easy access across multiple research teams and locations.
Extracts precise plot-level metrics, such as plant counts and vegetation indices, via CSV exports.
Utilizes AI-driven tools, like Solvi’s PlantAI, to distinguish crops from weeds and refine plant counts.
Collects rich multispectral datasets for future and retroactive analysis and comparison.

The nice thing about using Solvi is that we have all the fields in the same place,” notes Calvet. With a single dashboard, MAS Seeds can monitor trials across Europe, compare results, and make informed breeding decisions faster than ever before.

mas_seeds_streamlining_collaboration — With Solvi’s cloud platform, MAS Seeds centralizes trial data, runs AI-powered analyses, and streamlines research decisions across 200+ locations around the world.

Impact on Varietal Selection and Research Efficiency

Since integrating drone imagery and Solvi’s analytics, MAS Seeds has increased their trial capacity by 40% while reducing manual labor requirements. Standardizing data collection and comparison has improved their data reliability and enlarged their trial pipeline for superior genetic selections and greater customer value.

Transforming Field Trials with AI-Powered Insights

Varietal selection is a numbers game. Increasing research throughput uplevels industry impact. Solvi’s suite of plant-level field analytics changes agricultural trials from complex to coordinated. Collect hectares of data in minutes and analyze counts, plant health, crop height and other metrics across fields and time.

There are a lot of imagery tools out there,” says Calvet. “We use Solvi because of its excellent plant detection tool. It has fundamentally changed how we do field trials.

With drone technology and Solvi’s AI-powered analytics, MAS Seeds has unlocked the ability to test more varieties faster and with greater precision and efficiency.