For all the sophistication of modern agriculture, a surprising amount of field research still comes down to a person with a clipboard, a pen, and a best guess.
That is the problem Jeremiah Roeth has spent the last several years trying to solve.
Roeth, the founder and CEO of aerialPLOT, did not come into agriculture through the usual front door. He grew up on a farm in Ohio, but left to study chemistry, earned a Ph.D. in cell biology, then built his career in synthetic biology, where he helped develop automated, high-throughput screening systems inside a startup that eventually went public. Then he came home.
What he found when he returned to the family farm and joined Buckeye Ag Testing was an industry full of opportunity, but also one still leaning heavily on manual measurements, subjective ratings, and long gaps between observation and insight.
That contrast stuck with him. “In an afternoon, I can put a drone up, fly an entire research farm, generate data on 50,000 plots,” Roeth said. “Rather than sending one person out and having them be able to do a couple hundred plots at a time.”
That idea became aerialPLOT, an ag tech company built around high-resolution drone imagery, cloud-based analytics, and objective crop measurement. The company works primarily with ag input companies, not directly with farmers, helping them test how products perform in the field across time, environments, and geographies.
In simple terms, aerialPLOT helps the companies behind genetics, crop protection products, fertilizers, and biologicals understand what their products are actually doing in realworld conditions.
That matters because agriculture is increasingly a game of nuance.
There are very few blockbuster products anymore, the kind that produce obvious, universal results in every field. More often, the products entering the market today work differently depending on soil type, weather, genetics, management practices, and geography. A product may perform well, but only under the right conditions. The challenge is proving that clearly enough to make smarter recommendations.
That is where aerialPLOT has found its lane.
The company flies drones over research trials throughout the season, not just once, but on a repeating schedule that builds a time-series record of crop development. By systematically capturing imagery every couple of weeks, aerialPLOT can measure canopy development, model crop growth, and help clients understand not just whether a product worked, but where, when, and under what conditions it worked best.
Traditional field trials often operate like a black box. A company may hire researchers in the spring, wait through the growing season, and get a final package of results in the fall, with limited visibility into what happened in between. Unless someone physically visits every site and walks every trial, much of the season is hidden.
Roeth saw that as both inefficient and avoidable.
With aerialPLOT’s system, clients can log into a cloud-based platform and see imagery and measurements from trials throughout the season. Instead of waiting until harvest to understand how a product behaves, they can follow crop response as it unfolds.
aerialPLOT’s work spans a broad geographic footprint, reaching from the Mississippi Delta through the Corn Belt and now into Canada, according to Roeth. To handle that, the company has built a distributed drone pilot network, standardized equipment, and heavily automated the movement of data from drone to analytics platform.
Roeth said aerialPLOT has invested heavily in making sure its pilots use the same hardware, follow the same process, and feed data into the same system. That avoids the “mixed bag” that can come from relying too heavily on outside contractors and inconsistent equipment.
It also helps explain why aerialPLOT has carved out a distinct niche in a crowded ag tech market.
There are no shortages of digital tools aimed at farmers. But aerialPLOT chose a different route. Rather than asking growers to buy into another platform and prove return on investment on the front end, the company focused on serving the businesses that develop and test agricultural products.
“We want to basically empower companies that are taking products to the farmer and give them better data to better optimize the production system,” Roeth said.
For Roeth, the bigger issue is not just gathering more data. It is gathering the right data, early enough, often enough, and with enough context to make it meaningful.
He points to biologicals as a good example. Many growers see potential in biological products, but adoption has been tempered by inconsistent performance. Roeth believes that inconsistency is often less a product problem than a data problem.
If a company cannot say with confidence that a product works best in a specific soil type, climate condition, or genetic background, then the recommendation will always feel vague. aerialPLOT’s goal is to help close that gap.
That larger philosophy runs through the entire business.
Roeth is wary of ag tech that starts with flashy tools and then goes looking for a problem to solve. His view is almost the reverse. He came out of the field research world knowing exactly where the pain points were, then built technology around them
“A lot of times, technology companies have cool tech, and they’re looking for a problem,” he said. “I had a problem, and I found some cool tech to build a solution from.”
That practical mindset also shaped one of the company’s biggest early decisions
At first, aerialPLOT was conceived more as a software business. The plan was to build a SaaS platform that researchers could use to process their own drone imagery. But the concept hit a wall. Too many users had different hardware, different skill levels, and different workflows. Without consistent data coming in, the software could not deliver consistent value.
So the company pivoted.
Instead of selling software alone, aerialPLOT bundled drone flight services with its analytics platform. That shift created a more vertically integrated model, one in which the company could control data quality from collection through analysis
Roeth credits that pivot in part to the blunt advice of Gary Nijak Jr., now the company’s COO and head of business development, who pushed early on for a servicebased model. It was a bigger lift, requiring more operational complexity and investment, but it also made the business stronger.
It forced aerialPLOT to stay close to the market
That, in many ways, is one of the most revealing parts of Roeth’s story. aerialPLOT has grown largely without raising fresh outside capital since its early partnership phase. Roeth said the company has funded its growth primarily through revenue, building the business on a model that customers were willing to keep paying for.
That bootstrap mentality has shaped how the company thinks.
“When you run a revenue-driven business, you stay super in touch with what your value proposition is,” Roeth said.
It is a perspective that stands out in a sector where many startups have raced to scale on investor capital before fully proving demand. Roeth believes growing on revenue has kept aerialPLOT disciplined, close to customer needs, and honest about what actually works in the market.
Now the company is entering a new phase.
In March 2026, aerialPLOT announced it had relocated its headquarters to Fargo, saying the move would help accelerate growth and provide a stronger home base for its analytics platform, software development, and UAV-based data collection. The company also said Fargo’s ag innovation ecosystem, business climate, and available incentives were key factors in the decision.
Roeth said the move was driven by several factors, including a desire to build more of a concentrated team around software and data science, a more central location in the Upper Midwest, and the chance to plug into a broader ag tech ecosystem than he initially realized existed in the region. The company also now has a Canadian entity, aerialPLOT Canada, and operations/FTEs there for this growing season.
With the move, aerialPLOT plans to expand functions in software development, data science, and UAV-based data capture, while also working with Grand Farm on 2026 field trial collaborations.
That partnership makes sense
Grand Farm has positioned itself as a collaborative agricultural innovation network built around growers, startups, corporations, researchers, and technology partners. For a company like aerialPLOT, which lives at the intersection of agronomy, geospatial data, and field-scale validation, it is a natural fit.
Even with that momentum, Roeth remains clear-eyed about where the company fits and where it does not.
He is skeptical of some of ag tech’s more ambitious promises, especially the idea that imagery alone will unlock seamless reactive management during the season. Detecting a disease or stress event early is one thing. Acting on it quickly enough, under real field conditions and real weather constraints, is another.
That is why Roeth is more interested in predictive and prescriptive systems than reactive ones.
His long-term view is not just about telling someone what is wrong in a field today. It is about helping them make better decisions before the season even begins. What product, what placement, what management plan, in what environment, gives the crop the best probability of success?
That is a harder problem. But it may also be the more valuable one.
And aerialPLOT may be unusually positioned to tackle it.
Because the company starts with high-resolution drone imagery collected in controlled trial environments, it can build models using a much richer layer of detail than lowerresolution satellite systems alone can provide. Roeth sees that as a potential bridge between highly precise research data and more scalable applications in production agriculture.
In other words, the company’s future may not stop at helping product developers run better trials. It may eventually extend into helping distributors, consultants, co-ops, and larger growers make better, more data-driven decisions at scale.
For now, though, the company is focused on what it already does well, bringing structure, transparency, and objectivity to a part of agriculture that has gone too long without enough of any of the three.
aerialplot.com
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