When Drones Become the New Farm Tool: Who Defines “Scientific Farming”?
I. The Black Box Behind Drone Crashes
Drone crashes are common — not only with agricultural drones but with commercial drones of all kinds. Once a crash occurs, the drone in mid-air slips beyond the pilot’s control, either plummeting to the ground with a heavy thud or snagging on an obstacle.
The drone crash I happened to witness knocked out power across several surrounding villages for an entire day. Because the drone had torn through the cables, causing the outage, everyone in the area expressed understanding. A day without electricity doesn’t disrupt rural life all that much. The one person truly hard-hit was the drone pilot involved in the accident.
The pilot, surnamed Li, was in his mid-forties and had been in the trade for just over two years. The accident cost him dearly. The propeller blades had been destroyed, so he rushed the drone to his dealer. The broken parts weren’t in stock in the county town, so he had to wait a few days for a shipment from the provincial capital. The new parts plus delivery came to just under 1,000 yuan, of which insurance would cover a substantial portion.
But the problem was that the farming window doesn’t wait. The landowner found a new pilot the very same day to finish the remaining spraying work, and the jobs Brother Li had already lined up for the next few days had to be handed over to other pilots. Roughly calculating, that single job plus the work that followed could have earned him over 1,000 yuan — now he wouldn’t make a penny.
On top of that, he had to shoulder other losses from the accident. The cable that had been severed was a main line supplying power to several nearby villages, and the power supply bureau dispatched a repair crew immediately upon receiving the call. Excluding the lost income from the blackout, the repair costs and staffing charges alone brought Brother Li’s total payout to over 2,000 yuan.
The crash had been caused by Brother Li’s failure to manually mark the obstacle. He explained, “The radar fitted to the drone can detect most obstacles, but a loose, dangling cable like that isn’t easy to pick up. Before I started work, I asked Liu Er — the owner of the plot — whether there were any power lines on the land. He said no, so I didn’t bother walking the field myself or using the remote to flag it. And who would have thought I’d run into one?”
Typically, before operating a drone on a job, a pilot will first plan and survey the work area. Surveying involves using the drone’s high-precision sensors to photograph the farmland from the air, rapidly capturing spatial data of the terrain, and then setting work boundaries, obstacle marking, and flight-path planning. Drone surveying has grown increasingly intelligent year on year, and most common obstacles can now be identified and flagged automatically.
Yet no matter how far drone technology advances, there will always be edge cases that pilots must handle with care; the work cannot be left entirely to the drone’s survey system. The user manual notes that the DJI T100, released in 2024, may fail to detect small obstacles, sagging power lines, or objects level with the drone’s landing legs, and that manual control may be necessary to prevent flight accidents. In cases involving vertical poles, electricity pylons, and the like, radar detection performance is limited, and users are urged to fly with extra caution. Otherwise, one careless moment — and you end up like Brother Li, catching a length of black cable and sending the drone crashing into the line.
There are many causes of drone crashes, and contact with a power line is just one. Precautions for working near high-voltage power lines are covered in pilot training, and DJI Agriculture’s official website also outlines how to handle such situations. Pilots who have flown drones for years have developed their own tried-and-tested rules of thumb. Brother Yang, who has been a drone pilot for nearly a decade, follows a “”three no-fly” rule”: no flying at noon (thermal updrafts), no flying over graves (magnetic anomalies), no flying near high-voltage power lines (signal interference).
But beyond pilot error, technical misjudgement, and environmental factors, the growing technological black box is itself a significant cause of crashes. “Drone crash” is an issue that is both highly specialised and extremely common. Industry engineers have ample technical resources to study and address it, but for pilots whose knowledge comes from experience and hearsay, the root causes of such accidents remain a “black box”. They have no way of knowing exactly where the machine failed; all they can do is guess at the cause based on their own encounters and the stories they have heard.
For pilots and farmers alike, the more immediate problem is that only the manufacturer holds the repair expertise. From returning a drone to the factory for repair to getting it fixed and back in operation, the process drags on. The farming window doesn’t wait, and farmers often pay extra to make up for the time lost to a crash. The crashed drone’s pilot is sometimes expected to share in those costs too.
Yet increasingly dependent on drones as they are, they have no real choice but to passively trust whichever brand offers the strongest product guarantees.
XAG’s flagship product, the P80 agricultural drone, suffered a string of accidents in the summer of 2021. Searching for “XAG P80” on Toutiao, Douyin, Kuaishou, and other short-video platforms, you can still find farmers from all over the country showing footage of this drone crashing.
XAG’s after-sales team ultimately offered the following solution: a paid buy-back of the surveying system; an additional 20,000 yuan of insurance coverage for users in Heilongjiang province; and a promise to repair the spreading system free of charge within a set deadline that year.
Three years on, the shadow cast by that episode still hangs over farmers. Among the more than a dozen pilots and farmers I interviewed, the proportion flying DJI was 100 per cent. Zhao Mingliang, a large-scale grain producer in the village, had just bought a drone this year. I asked him why he hadn’t chosen XAG’s latest model, the P150, given that the price and features were comparable. He said, “First, XAG had far too many crashes in the couple of years before — the fallout just isn’t something I could bear; second, XAG has too few local service centres, so when something goes wrong, getting it repaired is a nightmare.”
These new types of farm machinery, held up as the face of smart agriculture, inspire a mixture of love and fury. One farmer, talking about them, couldn’t help swearing through gritted teeth: “(Drones) — this bloody thing, nobody can work out what’s going on with it!”
And yet they are utterly devoted to their drones. Because with a drone in hand, they hold out hope of boosting their yields — though when you stop to think about it, that hope seems almost superstitious.
II. High-Yield Anxiety on the Land
Sun Bin was among the first in the village to buy a drone, and he fits the profile of the typical drone-buying group perfectly. Three generations of his family have farmed the land, and he is a well-known large-scale grain producer in the village. His yields are measured against everyone else’s every year, and people all say that Sun Bin’s family manage to “fill several extra sacks per mu”.
To get to the bottom of the secret behind his family’s high yields, I paid a special visit to his farm. That morning, Sun Bin was washing his drone at home. He has a habit of giving the drone a rinse after a few jobs, and he was carefully hosing down the body and propeller blades with a high-pressure jet, servicing the machine with great care.
He told me that during the growing season he typically applies fertiliser four to five times. In the old days, equipment limitations made that difficult, but now, with a drone, he can fertilise according to the recommended schedule. “It’s my own machine, after all, so when it hits a growth milestone and it’s time to fertilise, I just go ahead and do it — give it a boost! It does help, it definitely does.”
And yet Sun Bin couldn’t explain why. He attributed his family’s high yields entirely to experience. “I’ve been farming all my life — it’s all down to experience. There’s no secret trick; everyone else does it this way, so we do it this way too. All it comes down to is being willing to put in the hard work (a Northeast dialect phrase meaning to endure hardship and work hard).”
Many people in the village, like Sun Bin, couldn’t clearly explain the link between drones and higher yields. In the past, their method for boosting output was simply to apply more chemical fertiliser: the more fertiliser, the higher the yield.
The government also rolls out policies and incentives such as “one spray, multiple boosts“, which reinforce the idea among farmers that more fertiliser means higher yields. So they are happy to buy more chemical fertiliser and use drones to apply it more times per season. But chemical fertiliser cannot raise yields indefinitely, and the soil degradation that comes from over-reliance on it ultimately constrains yields.
Now, farmers prefer to say that they farm by the principles of science. But what exactly counts as “scientific” farming?
III. Who Defines “Science”
Today, the agri-input sector has gradually shifted from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market. Where once competition was confined to different brands of pesticide, fertiliser and distribution channels, new technologies such as drones have now joined the fray. Agri-supply dealers, keen to shift product, have become quite adept at pulling off flashy gimmicks. One evening, as I was strolling through the village, I overheard people discussing a local agri-supply shop’s well-rehearsed routine — a free dinner.
‘They phone ahead, lay on a spread at the restaurant and treat everyone to a meal — it’s all free. After dinner, a “specialist” holds a talk on fertiliser application, pesticide spraying and field management, and if you buy on the spot there’s a hefty discount,’ a villager who had been there told me.
In the old days, agri-supply shops sold to nearby customers and relied on repeat business to keep sales steady. Now, though, dealers across many areas are rolling out a whole range of tactics to attract customers: some have shifted from a single product line to selling fertilisers, pesticides and seeds all under one roof; others have expanded from the old model of waiting for farmers to walk in the door to multi-channel sales — for instance, supplying large-scale grain producers directly with products and services, bidding on government procurement projects, or offering aerial spraying services; still others are sharpening their technical marketing skills, so that when a farmer arrives with a crop problem, they can tailor a bespoke fertiliser-and-pesticide programme and promise that “the moment the spray lands, the problem is solved”, winning the farmer’s trust.
When drone technology took off, agri-supply dealers began partnering with drone dealers to sell as bundles. They repeatedly championed the advantages of drone-applied fertiliser to farmers. Drone dealer Li Changjiang, for instance, was fond of singing the praises of foliar fertiliser by drone. ‘Look,’ he would say, ‘when the maize has grown this tall, a hit of foliar fertiliser lifts the yield — same with soya beans, it boosts the protein. Once the maize canopy has reached row closure, no other sprayer can get in, so can you really afford to skip it? Look at the high-yield farmers last year — they sprayed fertiliser five, six times a season. That’s why you need a drone to put on several extra rounds of foliar fertiliser — higher yields, higher income.’
Whether applying foliar fertiliser more times by drone inevitably raises crop yields remains, in academic terms, a correlation rather than a causal link, yet in the mouths of agri-supply dealers it is presented as a certainty. They fire up a PowerPoint and lecture on the “nano-penetration principle of foliar fertiliser” and other dressed-up scientific jargon to validate their claims, and farmers are left with no way to tell real science from marketing.
IV. Old Farmers Trapped in Information Cocoons
Second Uncle had been farming all his life, too, and was a staunch opponent of drones, convinced they were of no use whatsoever when it came to raising yields.
Beyond his forty years’ experience on the land, Second Uncle’s ‘fertilising is pointless’ stance in his sixties drew on hard-nosed cost calculations and internet “experts”.
With the rise of e-commerce, buying pesticides and fertilisers through livestream channels had become a new route to market, dealing a heavy blow to traditional agri-supply sales. Every day, tens of thousands of people go live on short-video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou. Among the agricultural hosts, some are farmers, some are agri-supply dealers, and others are self-styled “agricultural experts”.
Some loudly champion drone spraying as a way to boost production and lift yields, while others reject it outright, insisting it does nothing at all. Both sides brandish data, anecdotes and experience to back up their claims, leaving farmers hard pressed to sift truth from noise in the flood of information. And the platforms’ content-recommendation algorithm keeps feeding you accounts and views that match your own while filtering out dissent or anything you dislike, so among farming communities the question of “how on earth should you farm your land” has in effect spawned one information cocoon after another.
He also ran the numbers. Previously, when he used a spray truck, he fertilised twice a year, and once the maize or soya bean plants grew too tall for the truck to pass through in the later part of the season, he simply stopped. Factoring in the cost of fertiliser, it worked out to just over 200 yuan per shǎng of land (≈ 15 mu). Now, with a drone, plant height is no obstacle, so he can fertilise right through the entire growing cycle. As the dealers put it, about five applications a year gives the best results — and that pushes the fertiliser bill up to over 500 yuan per shǎng.
‘They say a drone can boost yields by 15 per cent, but with grain prices this low, are the extra three dou of grain even enough to pay for the pesticide and fertiliser?’ Second Uncle said.
Around the National Day holiday in 2024, large stretches of the Northeast were deep into maize and soya bean harvest. Farmers I had visited over the summer all said this year’s crop was a good one, the yields high. Second Uncle had applied fertiliser just twice this year, yet his yield showed no marked shortfall compared with neighbours who had sprayed five or six times.
Whether staunch drone advocates or firm opponents, everyone rejoiced at the bumper harvest. But grain prices in 2024 were far below those of previous years. From autumn onwards, maize prices in the Northeast slid steadily downward, dropping from the customary 1.2–1.4 yuan per jin in earlier years to just 1.1 yuan per jin this year. That meant the sale price of maize per shǎng was at least 2,000-odd yuan lower than in previous years. Because drone-using farmers faced even higher costs on top — at least an extra 500-odd yuan per shǎng in fertiliser and pesticide, plus 200 to 300-odd yuan per shǎng to hire a drone for spraying — when every last penny was reckoned, whether drone enthusiasts or sceptics, their net profit per shǎng was barely anything at all.
V. Higher Yields ≠ Higher Income: The Overlooked Chain
On the supply side, the falling maize price has two drivers. The market has seen increased volume — this year’s larger maize crop, plus unsold grain held back from last year’s harvest. The resulting oversupply has brought about the age-old cycle of cheap grain harming farmers. At the same time, maize imports have risen steadily over the past two years, adding further pressure on supply.
And yet, so long as final yields go up, farmers are willing to sink more cost into the land and apply more fertiliser — half conviction, half a bet.
It should be made clear that farmers always retain the right to decide whether or not to use more chemical fertiliser. They are not blindly following agri-supply dealers’ rhetoric; they have a system of judgement rooted in experience. The single most important factor in that system is yield. If that autumn’s harvest turns out bigger, the extra fertiliser is judged worthwhile and input spending rises the following year. This is what Second Uncle meant when he said, “The more years you work the land, the more of these inputs you pump into it.”
Conversely, a drop in yield shakes a farmer’s confidence, and the next year’s inputs are applied more conservatively. This also speaks to the defining character of farming as an industry whose object of labour is living organisms — “庄稼不得年年种” (a Northeast dialect phrase meaning: no matter how poor this year’s crop, you still plant again next year).
More often than not, though, it comes down to a gamble: investing higher costs to sustain stable, high yields and betting on a good grain-purchase price. After all, for a farmer, that is about the only move available.
At the same time, a lingering scepticism persists: Has the drone really lifted grain yields? And even if it has, why won’t the money stick?
Faced with these questions, the drone formations in the sky offer no answers. All that remains across the land are neat, demarcated plots — priced, and silent.
About the Lianhe Creative Programme
About Foodthink’s “Lianhe Creative Programme”: To understand the current state of food and agriculture, and to support more people in exploring the complexities behind food and farming issues, Foodthink partnered with several public-interest and media organisations to launch the 2024 Lianhe Creative Programme, which funds media creators and researchers to carry out field research in food and agriculture and to produce publicly accessible content.
After multiple rounds of interviews with a panel of six judges, 18 projects were selected for support under the Lianhe Creative Programme. Eleven have so far been published:
“A Cleaner Called A-Mei Just Wants to Eat Well | The Working Person’s Table”
“In Malaysia, Chinese Traders Want Only Grade-A Durian”
“‘Fake Meat’ Displaces the Real Thing: Herders, the Dinner Table, and the Amazon”
“Guaranteed-Sweet Watermelons, the Bitter Work of Growing Them”
“From the Guoshan Yao to ‘The Chosen Mushroom Foragers’: The Termite-Mushroom Frenzy”
“Ma Lan in Shenzhen, with No One to Share a Meal”
“Why Has the Sweetness of Childhood Disappeared?”
“Technology, Pesticides and Drone Pilots: The Other Side of the ‘Tech Revolution'”
Beyond the high-cost, high-tech route, for small and medium-scale farmers with modest resources, mastering low-cost, easy-to-implement ecological agriculture techniques tailored to local conditions is the more realistic and viable path. From 23 to 25 December 2025, Foodthink, together with partner organisations, will host the second edition of the Place-Based Ecological Agriculture Co-Learning and Co-Building Camp on the outskirts of Guangzhou. The camp invites frontline “grassroots experts” and farmer mentors to provide hands-on instruction in practical skills such as soil improvement, compost making, and liquid fertiliser preparation, and to explore market pathways and community-building possibilities for ecological agriculture. Applications are open from now until 14 December, and half- or full-scholarship applications can still be submitted by 10 December! Whether you are already transitioning or hoping to take up ecological agriculture, you are welcome to join us and find your own path to sustainable farming.
All interviewees in this article use pseudonyms
Editors: Xiaodan, Yuyang