Chinese agrotechnology going global: DJI reveals the global agricultural revolution behind 400,000 drones

DJI, a global civilian drone leader, released its fourth annual agricultural drone report DJI Agricultural Drone White Paper at the Agrishow 2025 held in Brazil. Focusing on agricultural drone development and application, the White Paper presents more mature agricultural drone applications, which are moving into a new stage of growth. A growing number of aviation administrations in more countries are implementing more friendly policies to accelerate the global development of precision agriculture and smart crop protection.

By the end of 2024, roughly 400,000 DJI agricultural drones have been running worldwide, which is an increase of nearly 90% over 2020. The wide application of this technology saves about 222 million tons of water, and reduces carbon emission, which is a strong support to the sustainable development of agriculture and ecological protection.

″An agricultural drone has become an indispensable equipment of farms worldwide,″ says Zhang Yuan, DJI Global Sales Director, ″Thanks to the science-based policy development, the constantly improved process-based and standardized pilot training, the participation of young and female pilots has increased significantly in recent years.″ As the global agricultural drone industry continues to mature, DJI is firmly committed to helping farmers improve efficiency through innovation of drone technology to contribute to the continuous improvement of the global agricultural production in a sustainable way.″

Nie Hongyuan, DJI agricultural senior business manager

A keynote speaker at 2025 China Pesticide Exporting Workshop (CPEW)

At the 2025 China Pesticide Exporting Workshop (CPEW), to be held on July 10-11, 2025, Nie Hongyuan is prepared to share DJI experience in local agricultural cooperation around the world via renovation of conventional farming model. This is not only an excellent example of China’s agricultural solutions serving the whole world, but is also a major trending in development of global precision agriculture. DJI Agriculture will be pleased to discuss with agrochemical elites about the future development and possible cooperation in agricultural production.

Click here to learn more about the event: ----

Policy-based scientific experiment accelerating agricultural drone applications

In 2024, as agricultural drone applications continue to expand, some countries are moving from limited trials to full-scale applications, whilst some other countries are extending single crop use to applications to wider range of crops. This is largely due to the smart technology-oriented policies formulated by local aviation administrations. For example, Argentina has reduced restriction on deployment of drones for agricultural land; Spain has streamlined the approval process for agricultural drone applications; meanwhile Brazil has further standardized drone pilot training process, making legal operation of spraying drones more easily.

DJI improving anti-drift design of spraying drones

Whether it be a spraying drone, conventional aircraft, or ground equipment, it still remains to be a major challenge for aerial application to limit drift in an effective manner. To tackle the issue, DJI Agriculture conducted extensive drift testing in collaboration with partners around the world in 2021 - 2024 to have optimized design of drone spray head and airflow dynamics. Moreover, the presentation from DJI will share the best practices in reduction of drift. The measures taken include recommended operating at low wind speed, selecting of appropriate flight altitude, and determining of droplet size according to different pesticide and field conditions.

Case studies of spraying, sowing and orchard management

The White Paper has included several new cases of spraying and sowing applications covering corn, coffee bean, canola, sunflower, rice, banana and vineyards.

• Planting of coffee with drones in Brazil: By using DJI Agras T40 and Agras T50 drones to apply insecticides, fungicides and foliar fertilizers, the cost of coffee planting is reduced by 70% versus manual spraying and 50% versus tractor spraying.

  
  

• Best practices in sowing of rice seed with drones: By working together with rice growers worldwide, DJI Agriculture has documented several important notes for planting of rice seed, namely the adjustment of route span-based flight altitude and sowing disc speed, use of a tractor to level and measure terrain altitude variation, and the pre-germinated rice seed not exceeding 3 mm.

  
  

• Vineyard management in Romania: After the use of DJI Agras T50, a senior vineyard owner cut down chemical usage in half, from 241.64 liters to 111.94 liters. He no longer needs to spend 3-4 days in spraying, just taking only 2.5 hours to complete the spraying. Even after raining, he is able to use a spraying drone for efficient treatment to crops on a sloping terrain, rather than using a conventional tractor.