New use for drones as 3,000 crop spraying drones help Chinese farmers fly into the future

2018-09-22 -

Crop spraying drones help Chinese farmers fly into the future Drones were used to spray cotton fields with pesticide in Xinjiang, covering an area of more than 400,000 hectares. Farmers benefit significantly by replacing manual farming with machinery as drones are able to cover 40 times the area a human woul... • Thousands of crop spraying drones are innovating farming in cotton-rich Xinjiang, China. • They are less destructive than tractors and humans while doing the same job. Drones are being used to spray cotton fields with pesticide in Xinjiang, China, covering an area of more than 4,000 square kilometres. Farmers benefit significantly by replacing manual farming with machinery as drones can cover 40 times the area a human would be able to spray in a single day

Justin Gong, vice president from XAG, a global agriculture automation company, said they are using 3,000 crop dusting drones in the cotton rich Xinjiang. A perk of using the drones is they can access areas that manual farming machinery can’t. As they spray form above the drones avoid crushing crops, unlike tractors and humans, while doing the same job. “Using drones flying over the surface and spraying will not cause any crushing or reduction in output,” said Yusen Shi, a farmer in Xinjiang.