Technology, Pesticide and Drone Pilots: The Other Side of a “Technological Revolution”
July is the peak season for spraying paddy fields. Insecticides, pre-emergence herbicides and foliar nutrient sprays all need to be applied by drone. As the drone lifts off, its four rotors spin up to full speed in an instant, producing a roaring “whirring” sound that blasts up a great cloud of dust. It rises vertically to its preset altitude and then flies automatically along its pre-programmed route at a steady speed in a perfectly straight line.
Compared to the small consumer drones used for photography, agricultural drones are far larger, weighing over 30 kg, with a much greater payload capacity. They are typically fitted with spraying or seeding units. During operations, the pesticide in the drone’s tank is released through nozzles mounted beneath the fuselage; the spray is atomised into a uniform curtain of mist that drapes this pale green paddy field in a flowing veil.
In this breakneck age that investors have dubbed “Agriculture 4.0”, a technological revolution is unfolding 300 metres above the ground. Expanding low-altitude technology applications has also been written into the 2025 Central Document No. 1. Data show that China is now the country with the largest area of farmland serviced by agricultural drones in the world, with over 2.1 billion mu of operations carried out each year. Agricultural drone flight hours account for 98% of the entire drone industry.
But the industry reports that project a market worth hundreds of billions of yuan never include the drone operators who work quietly in the fields. The pilot community is obscured beneath the grand narrative of smart agriculture.
What kinds of people does the agricultural drone industry actually attract? Is being a drone pilot still a worthwhile career choice? And what do the pilots themselves truly feel and experience?
With these questions in mind, I returned to my hometown in Heilongjiang in the summer of 2024 and sought out several drone pilots for interviews, hoping to understand this community and the agricultural drone industry as it really is.
I. Migratory Drone Pilots
His first encounter with drones came because his farm machinery could not operate right at the edges of his fields. The outer margins never received even coverage, and where pesticide did reach, the weed control was far from satisfactory. In his twenties at the time, Yang heard about the advantages of drone spraying and, on a friend’s recommendation, enrolled at a drone training school in Baotou. It took him over four months and 30,000 yuan in tuition, but he eventually received a red certificate issued by the national human resources authority — a drone licence.
From 2015 onwards, agricultural drone hardware and applications grew rapidly, with market ownership and serviced acreage expanding at pace, gradually maturing into a massive industry chain worth billions of yuan. Yang caught the wave at precisely the right moment.
In less than ten years, he had built a small drone-spraying team, going in with a few partners to purchase several of the latest drone models and a handful of high-horsepower electric pickup trucks.
Now, apart from working the family farm in the northeast during summer and autumn, Yang spends virtually the rest of the year driving his pickup, loaded with drones, across the country. In the southern regions in particular — Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan — surging demand and a severe labour shortage offer drone pilots a wealth of work. By early October, when the autumn harvest in the northeast is over, or even earlier in September, Yang begins his journey south through Henan, Shandong and Guangxi, finally reaching Hainan, before heading back north again in July or August of the following year.
In Yang’s words, Hainan is a drone pilot’s paradise and his favourite place to work. The island is rich in tropical and subtropical fruit trees, the weather stays warm all year, and the working conditions are comfortable. Aerial spraying covers a wide range of crops and pays well — for instance, spraying passion fruit trees commands 15 yuan per mu, roughly three times the rate for staple grain crops such as maize and soybeans. Fruit tree spraying requires more water, but the drones fly fast and release flow rates are high (35 litres per minute), so spraying efficiency remains good. Yang says that working in Hainan every year almost guarantees him a net income of around 2,000 yuan per day.
His account of life in Hainan always sounds effortless. “The work is easy there. When I arrive at a field, I usually spend just two hours spraying. I rest over the middle of the day, and in the afternoon I do more if there’s work — and if there isn’t, I go to the beach. What could be better?”
Professional drone pilots like Yang are predominantly young and middle-aged men. Most come from rural backgrounds, with a genuine affection for and understanding of farming, technical know-how and practical equipment skills, yet no desire to toil like their parents’ generation, faces bent to the earth and backs turned to the sky.
What drew Yang to this profession was the freedom it offered. “I don’t envy office workers. Nine-to-five is nice and all, but it doesn’t feel free to me. I can pack up and go whenever I want, just drive south. I can sightsee, take in the mountains and rivers after a day’s work. You see more places, you earn money, you have fun, you visit the sights — what’s not to love?”
But even Yang’s ideal of two-hour workdays depends on luck. When the weather turns, the crops won’t wait, and many pesticides have a narrow application window, so pilots often have to seize whatever brief spell of good weather there is and work without rest, clocking up ten or twelve hours or more in a single stretch. Drone pilots are half skilled, half manual workers: they rise before dawn, work well past sunset, and spend long hours under the sun, which takes a real toll on the body. They must also migrate like the birds, following the crop calendar, hauling all their equipment and belongings with them, heading wherever there is work, moving from one job to the next in operations that stretch from south to north. It pays better, but it is harder still.
But they are not quite as low-commitment as the small implements every household keeps in its shed, either. They sit closer to technology products with a capital dimension. Farmers who learn to fly a drone, once they have serviced their own land, take on drone-spraying orders from neighbours or local government at low rates, hoping to recoup their initial outlay as quickly as possible.
II. Drones Enter Ordinary Farms
In the county where I carried out my fieldwork, the local DJI dealer estimated that by 2024 the county had around 200 drones in total. For an agricultural county with 207,000 shang (3.105 million mu) of arable land, that number was already far too saturated.
Zhao Mingliang was well aware that recouping the cost of a T60 — let alone turning a profit — within the first year was virtually impossible. “I bought it mainly to handle my own land. Hiring someone else’s drone to spray my fields several times a year already costs thousands of yuan.”
But flying a drone you own yourself is not necessarily a good deal either. He tapped his calculator and worked through the sums with me: “Four yuan per mu, so that’s 60 yuan per shang. To recoup the 55,000-yuan outlay, I’d need to spray 13,750 mu — nearly 1,000 shang. Then add the electricity for charging the drone, labour costs, fuel for round trips, wear and tear on the machine, and so on. On top of all that, competition in the industry is this fierce. Breaking even is just too hard.”
Large-scale growers like Zhao Mingliang hope that once their own agricultural needs are met, they can offer drone-spraying services to others as much as possible and recover their purchase cost sooner. But the pace at which drones are superseded makes that expectation hard to fulfil. “This machine sells for 55,000 yuan this year, but next year, after depreciation, you can only get half that! The value drops so fast — same as a phone. Every year there’s a new model!”
Zhao Mingliang said, “The T60 is the latest this year — whether it’s the tank capacity or the atomisation, everything is better. So a lot of farmers come to me for spraying. But when a new model comes out next year, who’s going to want you?! Who wouldn’t want to hire a better machine for the same price?!”
DJI Agriculture’s official website is no different from that of any other tech company: the homepage showcases a handful of bestsellers and the latest flagship models, with updated figures touting more powerful features, more advanced technology and greater productivity. Older products that bear no resemblance to those adjectives do not even appear on the page. Even the T40, once the undisputed star that caused a sensation the moment it launched, is treated as though it never existed — swept into the dustbin of history. If a consumer wanted to buy a brand-new older model, they would probably have to turn to the second-hand market or a clearance sale.
Therefore, although the way agricultural drones are put to work is closer to that of traditional farm machinery — tractors, harvesters — their obsolescence cycle actually mirrors that of consumer electronics. Under the influence of annual upgrade marketing, farmers tend to favour hiring newer, better-equipped machines for sowing and fertilising.
Although breaking even within a year is difficult to achieve, Zhao Mingliang says that the farmers who bought drones this year, himself included, were really doing so in anticipation of large government drone-spraying contracts.
In recent years, local governments and state farms, seeking to meet the production and income-boosting directives set by higher authorities and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, have begun implementing the “One Spray, Multiple Benefits” policy. Specifically, during the critical yield-determining stages of major grain crops — the grain-filling stage for maize and the pod-filling stage for soybeans — drones are deployed to spray growth-promoting foliar fertilisers and similar inputs, helping to lift yields per unit area across large tracts and ensuring a bumper autumn harvest.
This programme is typically commissioned by government but executed privately: the government issues public tenders to licensed drone-spraying companies, which in turn subcontract individual pilots like Zhao Mingliang, since the volume is too great for any one firm to absorb alone.
Zhao Mingliang says, “In past years, if the winning company didn’t have enough drones, they’d bring them in from the south — they’re cheaper, and once those turned up we’d be out in the cold. But this year there are so many more drones right here locally, and the prices are lower, so naturally they’ll come to us first!” The prospect of landing such a large contract has weighed heavily on Zhao Mingliang’s mind; it was his main reason for entering the business.
Zhao Mingliang and Brother Yang represent two distinct types within the drone-pilot community: large-scale growers who also fly, and full-time pilots.
The full-time pilots typically entered the field earlier, many having initially been drawn to aeromodelling, model aircraft, various gadgets and apps, and they tend to have a more mature technical understanding of drones. For the large-grower pilots, the primary purpose of buying a drone is to service their own farm operations, with the odd job for neighbouring farmers helping to recoup the cost.
So once they became drone pilots, was life truly as rosy as they had hoped? What risks and hidden worries now confront them?
III. Pesticide Drift Damage
When pesticide drifts to non-target areas during application, it causes phytotoxicity to neighbouring crops — typically those downwind. For instance, mesotrione, sulcotrione, and atrazine are all common post-emergence herbicides used on maize. They boast broad weed control spectrums and are safe for the maize itself, but if soya beans, rice, cotton or other crops are planted nearby, the drifting spray can easily damage them. Once pesticide drift has occurred, it typically ignites a dispute between the operator of the sprayed field, the drone pilot and the farmer whose neighbouring crop has been damaged — a three-way tangle that is very hard to untangle.
Wang Xing was the only pilot I interviewed who had actually been made to compensate a farmer for pesticide drift damage. He admitted that he had not checked the weather before operating and had flown a herbicide-spraying mission over a maize field in a Force 3 wind. The soya bean field on the downwind side suffered accordingly: the leaves on nearly one shang of crops turned yellow and were close to withering away entirely.
The dispute was eventually settled with Wang Xing paying 20,000 yuan in compensation. The phytotoxicity incident directly influenced his career choice: after completing the aerial spraying of his own land that same year, he sold his barely six-month-old drone at a steep discount and said, “I’m never doing this again.”
Spraying herbicides is an operation that most drone pilots approach with extreme caution. If the field to be sprayed and its adjacent plots are planted with different crops, Zhao Mingliang simply refuses the job altogether. Brother Yang, meanwhile, has a team rule: avoid such work wherever possible; if a job must be accepted, check the weather in advance, prohibit flying at wind speeds above Force 2, and observe the surrounding environment meticulously during operations.
These rule-of-thumb measures appear to solve the phytotoxicity problem on the surface, but as long as drones are used to spray pesticide, drift remains unavoidable.
So Li Changjiang’s drone-spraying team at the dealership hit on a way of transferring the risk — signing an indemnity agreement with farmers before herbicide-spraying jobs, adding a “force majeure catch-all clause” to delineate responsibilities and shield themselves from liability.
But Li Changjiang has no idea whether such an agreement carries any real legal force. Having suffered a similar loss before, he can only insist that his team exercises this level of caution.
Last year, a pilot on Li Changjiang’s team was spraying herbicide over a maize field when the soya bean field next door suffered phytotoxicity. The owner of the soya bean field blamed the drone herbicide spray as the main cause, but Li Changjiang insisted the soya bean field had been sprayed with herbicide in its own right, making this in-field phytotoxicity, and that the widespread withering and yellowing across the plot was not the linear pattern a drone’s flight path would produce, so it had nothing to do with the pilot. That day, the soya bean farmer grabbed hold of their hands and refused to let them leave; the two parties squabbled on the spot for a long time.
In the end, the farmer filed a lawsuit against the pilot in court. The case has still not been decided to this day. “The little I earn doesn’t even cover the damages!” Li Changjiang said. The incident taught him a hard lesson: from now on, whenever a herbicide-spraying job comes along, he will turn it down if at all possible — even with an indemnity agreement in place.
At present, this new type of agriculture-related tort dispute occupies a legal vacuum, so disputes arising from pesticide drift damage caused by drone spraying are extremely difficult to resolve through legal channels. Searching for “pesticide drift” on short-video platforms reveals numerous unresolved cases.
The even less visible issue is one of environmental ethics. There have been news reports of a beekeeper whose 150 hives of honeybees were wiped out by drifting pesticide, and of drones spraying over fish ponds causing elevated deformity rates in crucian carp. These ecological disasters, too, demand our attention and recognition.
In reality, drift-rate measurements diverge considerably between laboratory tests and field trials due to a variety of factors, and the current national standard assesses only ground deposition levels, ignoring the airborne drift values. All of this is directly relevant to the pesticide drift damage problem.
Moreover, a persistent technical dilemma lies at the heart of drift phytotoxicity caused by drone spraying. The dilemma is this: drone manufacturers consider the product’s performance largely irrelevant to phytotoxicity, blaming it on the pilot’s improper operation. Pilots, on the other hand, argue that phytotoxicity is partly down to individual technique but more often to the drone’s spraying technology, operating modes and other design choices being poorly calibrated — and that they have no channel through which to feed back their concerns to the manufacturer.
During my fieldwork, Brother Yang told me that the shift in nozzle type might be behind the increased pesticide drift. “Today’s centrifugal nozzles atomise so finely that even in a Force 1 wind the spray drifts at least 20 metres or more. In a Force 2 wind, it reaches 50 to 80 metres. Above Force 2, the spray genuinely carries over a kilometre.”
What puzzles Brother Yang is this: the pressure nozzles used before did not carry pesticide this far — so why have manufacturers replaced pressure nozzles with centrifugal ones?
He has slowly formed a hypothesis — the manufacturers want to showcase ever-better atomisation; the fine mist produced by a centrifugal nozzle looks impressive. But the confusion it causes pilots, the potential financial losses, or the scale of crop yield reduction it might produce — that is simply not the manufacturer’s concern.
IV. Costs Never Calculated
He had once shown the camera a hospital CT scan — his “white lung”, caused by years of pesticide spraying operations. As self-employed workers, drone pilots carry no employee medical insurance, and there is no mechanism for them to register occupational hazards at their workplace. He did not know who to hold accountable: the farmers who hired him, or the company that sold him the machine?
In the course of agricultural production, farmers inevitably suffer bodily harm from pesticide exposure. Drone pilots, too, are aware of the health risks that spraying pesticide from the air can pose. Zhao Mingliang described for me what it is like during operations: “When you’re loading the pesticide, you pour several chemicals in and don’t even know whether they react with each other — the smell is overpowering, it stings your nose. When the drone takes off or lands, once the rotors spin up, the wind blast is tremendous. And if there’s any wind at all, the spray drifts — that’s really no good. That insecticide is incredibly potent. I reckon those veteran pilots who’ve been flying for years — the longer they go at it, the more it takes a toll on their health. Absolutely it does.”
Respiratory diseases, skin conditions and similar ailments caused by absorbing pesticide mist are among the most common occupational illnesses in the drone-pilot community. But after years of flying, they have, to a greater or lesser extent, grown accustomed to enduring the health risks that pesticide poses. In this emerging industry of socialised agricultural services, pilots do sometimes fall by the wayside when their health deteriorates. They bear the hidden costs of technological progress.
First, whether professional or non-professional, very few drone pilots ever sign a labour employment contract with any company or firm, so the very concept of an occupational disease does not fall within their medical insurance coverage. Once an illness arises during work, obtaining insurance compensation is extremely difficult, and the burden falls largely on the individual or the family.
Even if some professional pilots join a drone-spraying team and sign a contract with a company, health damage incurred on the job is often dismissed under an exemption clause attributing it to “improper personal protection”.
Moreover, to catch the agricultural calendar and seize whatever spell of good weather there is, professional pilots often have to get up at two or three in the morning and work around the clock, sometimes until the small hours. Physical exhaustion and gastrointestinal disorders are among the common chronic health risks facing the pilot community. In summer, with the biting flies and insects in the fields, the acrid stench of pesticide and everything else being unbearable, pilots can only suit up head to toe, leaving nothing but their eyes exposed. The sweltering heat and humidity further increase their risk of heatstroke.
V. Pilots Trapped in a Price War
The agricultural drone market, having gone through its period of explosive growth, is no longer a promising blue-ocean job market. “Earning 2,000 to 3,000 yuan a day” or “routinely clearing 10,000 yuan a month” is simply no longer a possibility for drone pilots.
The drone industry has long been locked in a price war — but it is not the equipment itself that is competing, it is the service price. In the first few years after Brother Yang entered the trade, the going rate was around ten-odd yuan per mu. Two years ago, local farms were charging about 5.5 yuan per mu, and this year the price has gradually slipped to 5 or even 4 yuan. The government drone-spraying contract that Zhao Mingliang had been pinning his hopes on ended up being sub-contracted out at 2.5 yuan per mu — below the drone’s actual operating cost — forcing many pilots to turn it down.
Some professional pilots like Brother Yang once roamed the whole country taking jobs. But as the number of drones on the market has climbed and competition has reached fever pitch, many simply cannot find enough work and quietly slip out of the trade.
The professional pilots who remain have more connections and can source more orders. Brother Yang belongs to several drone-pilot WeChat groups; these groups, each with close to 500 members, serve as information exchanges and knowledge-sharing platforms. Apart from repeat clients who give him work directly, his other jobs come through referrals from fellow pilots or announcements posted in the WeChat groups. What matters most for them is knowing how to do the arithmetic — understanding the fee structure and costs for each type of operation: spraying, fertilising, sowing. Their income is directly tied to volume: the more they fly, the more they earn. But pilots who lose out in the competition often find themselves leaving the countryside to look for work in big cities such as Beijing or Shanghai.
In addition, the industry has been carved into ever more specialised niches and longer value chains — drone operator training, for example, or a full-spectrum service model combining “farm machinery, agronomic expertise and agricultural inputs”. Li Changjiang, who was the first person in the area to go into the drone business, has built his own drone-spraying team alongside his role as a DJI dealer. Leveraging his company’s credentials, he secured government drone-spraying contracts, and by partnering with pesticide and fertiliser manufacturers to run a pesticide-supplied service model, his drone-spraying operation has steadily grown in scale locally.
As for the non-professional pilots who are large-scale grain growers, they buy drones primarily to work their own land, taking on the odd job for neighbours in the same or nearby villages. But because the market is approaching saturation, competition is cut-throat and unregulated, and Heilongjiang mostly grows a single-season crop — so the window for fertilising and spraying is short and tightly concentrated — many farmers, once they have finished their own fields, can find no other work to take on, and their hope of breaking even quickly often ends in disappointment.
Yet the number of orders simply affects when the cost of the machine can be recouped; there is no direct pressure on survival. Moreover, non-professional pilots do not fly their drones frequently, so the battery’s cycle life, as well as the lifespan of the motors and components, tend to be considerably longer. The drone, in effect, reverts to being a piece of farm machinery.
Since the occupation was listed in April 2019 as one of thirteen new job categories by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and two other departments, the lives of agricultural drone pilots have changed beyond recognition in just a few short years. As new-type agricultural enterprises rise, land-transfer rates climb and the market for agricultural inputs transforms under new conditions, both the agricultural drone industry and the role of drone pilot deserve to be seen by a far wider audience.
About the Lianhe Creative Plan
After multiple rounds of interviews by a panel of six judges, 18 creative projects were ultimately selected to receive support from the Foodthink Lianhe Creative Plan. Nine have already been published:
“Cleaner A Mei Wants a Good Meal | A Worker’s Table”
“In Malaysia, Chinese Traders Want Only Grade-A Durian”
“‘Fake Meat’ Drives Out the Real Thing: Herders, the Dinner Table, the Amazon”
“Guaranteed Sweet Watermelons, Bitter Work Growing Them”
“Ma Lan in Shenzhen, with No One to Eat With”
“Where Did the Sweetness of Childhood Go?”
“Why Guizhou Can’t Do Without Sour Soup, and Why Sour Soup Can’t Do Without Guizhou?”
All interview subjects mentioned in this article appear under pseudonyms.
Editor: Xiaodan