Adam Miller

From Napoleon, Ohio to the Global Hawk — and Back

I grew up in Napoleon, Ohio — a small town in the heart of northwest Ohio farm country where the flat, dark soil stretches to the horizon and the rhythm of planting and harvest shapes everything. I didn't grow up on a farm, but I grew up in farming. Friends, neighbors, and extended family worked the land.

In high school, I spent my summers baling hay for a local farm, fitting the work in between baseball games and football practice. It was honest, hot, physical labor — the kind that gives you a permanent respect for the people who do it year-round.

In 2006, I enlisted in the United States Air Force and spent the next twenty years as a geospatial intelligence analyst — one of the people who stares at imagery from satellites, high-altitude aircraft, and unmanned platforms and turns what they see into actionable intelligence.

When I came home to Ohio, I noticed something: the same remote sensing technology I'd spent my career mastering was beginning to appear over those same farm fields. Farmers were being sold drone technology by people who understood the gadgets but didn't understand farming — or by agronomists who understood the crops but couldn't explain the sensors. Nobody was bridging that gap in plain language.

So I wrote it.

Drones Over the Back Forty, published by Black Swamp Press, is that bridge. It's written for the multigenerational family farmer in the Midwest — primarily corn, soybean, and wheat operations ranging from 200 to 2,000 acres. If you're operating in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, or anywhere in the heart of the Corn Belt, this book was written with your fields in mind.