When Wang Fei started his agricultural drone company five years ago, the distinctive whirr of the autonomous vehicles went practically unheard over the wide swathes of farmland in his home county of Anlu.
A former sales manager for agricultural machines in the western hub of Chengdu, Wang said at the time he saw “great prospects” for the potential applications of drone technology before returning home to see those prospects out.
Now, Chufei Agriculture’s services cover about 40 per cent of the farmland in Anlu. With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) sowing seeds or spraying pesticides and fertilisers, yields are up for the central Chinese county and its population of about 487,000.
Wang’s success story is one of many unfolding as the pace of technological change in China ramps up. Its near-universal adoption of agriculture drones has sent the country to the top of global charts in terms of total operation area – and raised concerns in the United States over the devices’ ubiquity on American farms.
In the past year, a world-leading fleet of 251,000 spraying drones covered an aggregate 2.67 billion mu (178 million hectares) in China, according to data from the National Agro-tech Extension and Service Centre. Both figures increased nearly 25 per cent compared with 2023.
As China begins to look to what it terms the “low-altitude economy” – airborne economic activity within a range of 1 kilometre (0.6 miles) above ground – as a source of future growth, farm drones have been frequently mentioned as a pioneering innovation.