The prospects of agricultural drones

Agricultural drones, as the name suggests, are unmanned aircraft used for plant protection operations in agriculture and forestry. They consist of three parts: a flight platform (fixed-wing, single-rotor, and multi-rotor), GPS flight control, and a spraying mechanism. Spraying operations are carried out through ground remote control or GPS flight control. Journalists have learned that this type of plant protection machinery emerged in the field of agricultural plant protection around 2010 and quickly attracted the attention of experts and large-scale farmers.

According to relevant personnel from the National Agricultural Technology Extension Center, currently, the effective utilization rate of pesticides in China is only 30%, which is closely related to the backwardness of plant protection machinery. Relevant data shows that China's pesticide production technology is at a relatively advanced level in the world, but its plant protection machinery has long been in a relatively backward state. At present, the area controlled by manual backpack sprayers in China accounts for over 80% of the total controlled area. Small-scale farmers use sprinkling or backpack sprayers for spraying, but each person can only spray 15 mu of land per day. Large-scale farmers usually work in groups of six with sprayers, and on average, each person can only spray 20 mu of land per day.

The high efficiency features of unmanned plant protection aircraft should have a very promising future. Researcher Ye Zhenghe from the Plant Protection Institute of the Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences told reporters that currently, domestic unmanned plant protection aircraft are still in the research and development stage. Strictly speaking, there are no truly practical and mature products yet. Journalists have learned that the promotion and application of unmanned plant protection aircraft are currently slow. They have hardly been actually put into field plant protection and are mostly still in the application demonstration stage.

In the exhibition hall covering over 60,000 square meters, nearly 400 enterprises from 15 countries and regions including the United States, Canada and Germany brought a large number of agricultural machinery. Overseas enterprises participated in the exhibition with large lineups and on a large scale, such as John Deere and Agco from the United States, Kubota and Yanmar from Japan, and Daedong from South Korea. Domestic agricultural machinery enterprises such as China Academy of Agricultural Machinery, Foton Lovol and Dongyang were also all present. These agricultural machines cover the entire process of mechanization in the production of major food crops. They are "high, new, special and precise", which not only broaden people's horizons but also reflect the trend of agricultural development.

Unmanned plant protection aircraft represent the trend of modern agricultural development. Ding Shuanghui told the reporter that he was previously engaged in pig farming. With the call from Changsha County for farmers to retire and switch production, he and his other partners set their sights on vegetable and rice cultivation. However, due to the continuous increase in labor costs, the labor expenses for spraying pesticides and fertilizing take up a large proportion of the annual expenses. Therefore, Ding Shuanghui has been constantly thinking about how to control production costs. The application of agricultural protection aircraft has brought him new hope.