When 25,000 farmers in Hubei Province use unmanned aerial vehicles.

In the middle and late period of last year, 37-year-old Wang Jiaxin quit his hairdressing job in Shenzhen. He chose to go back home and engage in a new profession - agricultural plant protection.

Now, a year has passed, and the money Wang Jiaxin earns in a day is equivalent to the salary he used to earn in Shenzhen for several months. Currently, he mainly conducts plant protection through DJI T50. Wang Jiaxin calculated an account for everyone, "On average, it is sprayed 5 times a year. For areas under 15 mu, it costs 1,000 yuan. For areas under 100 mu, the price varies from 60 to 80 yuan per mu depending on the terrain. Compared to the previous manual labor, which cost 200 - 300 yuan per day. The main reason is that it is now difficult to find manual laborers. People are not willing to carry long hoses and climb up and down the mountains."

As Wang Jiaxin's fellow townsman, Guo Xingcheng is trying to use DJI drones to lift navel oranges. The services he provides include fruit picking and lifting, with a charge of 0.2 yuan per jin. The unit price is 5 cents cheaper than manual labor. However, the DJI T60 drone can lift 120 jin at a time, which is 24 yuan per trip. Even if it works for 6 hours, it can lift 20,000 jin. While a manual laborer can only carry 120 jin per trip, and only 2,000 jin per day.

Wang Jiaxin and Guo Xingcheng are from Zigui, a city known as the hometown of Chinese navel oranges, where 90% of the area has high mountains and steep slopes. This is a major agricultural county in Hubei Province, where 70% of the people are engaged in citrus-related industries. Now, both of them have a new title - drone pilots. In Zigui County, there are already more than 1,000 drone pilots, while a few years ago, there were less than 50.

Drone lifting operation

The growth of the drone pilot group is a vivid portrayal of Zigui's integration into the technological wave. Currently, the area of navel oranges planted in Zigui County reaches 400,000 mu, and the proportion of drone lifting in the county accounts for 30%, that is, 120,000 mu. According to the disclosed data, drones can reduce the cost by an average of 250 yuan per mu. Therefore, drone lifting can save 30 million yuan.

In terms of agricultural plant protection in Zigui, it covers approximately one-fourth of the area, that is, 100,000 mu, and the cost can be reduced by 799 yuan per mu, totaling 80 million yuan in a year. Overall, drones can save 100 million yuan in costs for Zigui, with remarkable results.

Agricultural Drones in the Low-altitude Economy Have the Highest Maturity

2024 is hailed as the first year of the low-altitude economy.

The low-altitude airspace refers to the airspace with a vertical height of less than 1,000 meters. In just the first half of this year, there were more than 60 financings in the low-altitude economy field, among which more than 12 had a financing amount of over 100 million yuan. Especially the popularity of eVTOL has accelerated the influx of more capital and funds into the low-altitude economy.

However, the biggest difficulty for eVTOL at present is the regulatory approval. Taking TC as an example, only 60 models have been approved in the past. Now, there are 600 models in the queue, which is a 10-fold increase.

In fact, many investors have overlooked a key fact. From the perspective of operation management classification, agricultural drones have the largest operation volume, accounting for 98.27% of the total operation volume. At the same time, the currently effective data of the drone cloud exchange system is 2.967 billion, which is converted into a flight time of 4.1205 million hours, an increase of 2.1809 million hours compared to the previous year. Among them, multi-rotor drones are the absolute mainstream, accounting for 99.7% of the total operation volume;

Thus, it can be seen that agricultural drones are the most mature field in the low-altitude economy, and agricultural drones have also been developed for more than 10 years.

Regarding the development of these 10-plus years, Shen Xiaojun, the head of the marketing department of DJI Agriculture, shared three important observation points:

First is the support of national policies. Especially in 2014, the No. 1 Central Document clearly proposed to "strengthen the construction of agricultural aviation", which gave birth to a large number of plant protection agricultural drones. Various subsequent standards, including product performance and quality standards, have also been introduced one after another.

Secondly, it is the subsidy for the purchase of agricultural machinery. In 2017, the first pilot was conducted in 6 provinces and cities, and this year, the subsidy for agricultural drones has been fully liberalized, which has played a significant role in promoting the industry; the last is the user service specification.

"More than half of the purchasers of agricultural drones are self-employed farmers. If only the machines are sold without considering the service, the user needs cannot be met." Shen Xiaojun pointed out.

Seeing this pain point, DJI established a subsidiary in 2016 to be responsible for training and solving the curriculum research and development and design of the agricultural sector. It is understood that DJI has trained a total of 300,000 trainees and has more than 1,000 training sites nationwide. One year later, after research, DJI determined the localized maintenance idea. Currently, DJI Agriculture has more than 1,100 maintenance outlets nationwide, and a maintenance outlet can be found within a 1-hour drive within 50 kilometers for maintenance.

A detail is that in addition to training 6,000 maintenance technicians every year, DJI has also established four spare parts warehouses in the northwest, northeast, central China, and south China to ensure the timely supply of spare parts. As of 2024, more than 98% of the maintenance cases can be completed within 6 hours.

DJI Agriculture's 12 Years: Technology Leading Agricultural Transformation

In 2015, the year after "strengthening the construction of agricultural aviation" appeared in the No. 1 Central Document, DJI officially established the Agricultural Machinery Division. In the same year, DJI also launched its first complete agricultural drone product - the MG-1 plant protection drone.

DJI Agriculture officially started in this way. The MG-1 realizes an industrial-level design product that is dust-proof, waterproof, and corrosion-resistant, with an operating capacity of 40 to 60 mu per hour, and the operating efficiency is more than 40 times that of manual spraying. But at this time, the unit price per kilogram load of the MG-1 exceeded 5,000 yuan, and the load capacity was only 10 kilograms, still in a high-cost stage.

For the current new model T60, the unit price per kilogram load has dropped to 1,000 yuan, a six-fold decrease; the load capacity has also increased from the initial 10 kilograms to 60 kilograms, a six-fold increase.

Only one year after the establishment of the Agricultural Machinery Division, DJI brought agricultural drones to Japan. Japan is the headquarters of Yamaha and also the earliest place for the development of agricultural drones. Up to now, the proportion of agricultural drones exported overseas accounts for one-third of the agricultural division, and the sales volume has increased 32 times compared to 2017. DJI agricultural drones are not only limited to the domestic market.

According to the data shared by Cheng Zhongyi, an engineer of DJI Agricultural Technology Solution, currently, DJI agricultural drones have accumulated more than 200,000 units, of which 2,500 are engaged in lifting. This year will be the first year of drone lifting, and great changes will occur in the next 2 - 3 years. "At present, the lifting is concentrated in three categories: seedlings, fruits, and grain crops, and the application scenarios are constantly expanding."

In the past 12 years, DJI has covered 38% of the cultivated land area in the country, among which the penetration rate of rice and wheat drones is even more than 40%. Beyond the land, DJI has also helped 500,000 people engage in flight protection service work.

As a technology company, what the outside world pays the most attention to is its technical strength. DJI released the latest T100 and T70 series of agricultural unmanned aircraft last month. Among them, the T100 agricultural drone is the first DJI agricultural drone equipped with AI and AR functions, with a maximum rated takeoff weight of 149.9 kilograms. It is the most efficient and has the most advanced safety system in DJI's agricultural history.

It has a spraying capacity of 75 liters and a sowing capacity of 150 liters. The maximum tension of a single axis is 82 kilograms, and it can operate at full load even with low battery power. It adopts a coaxial dual-rotor configuration, with 62-inch carbon fiber rotor blades, with strong power, and can achieve a maximum speed of 13.8 meters per second. In terms of the safety system, it is equipped with a lidar, three active phased array radars, and a five-eye fisheye vision system, which can sense and observe the surrounding environment in all directions and accurately identify obstacles.

The T70 has a spraying load of 50 kilograms and a sowing load of 70 kilograms. Moreover, the T70P is equipped with a 70-liter medicine box and a 41-ampere-hour long-lasting battery. In terms of the safety system, the T70 series is equipped with a three-eye vision system and front and rear active phased array radars. It also integrates AI and AR algorithms, giving the T70 series more agile obstacle avoidance and bypassing capabilities and more comprehensive safety guarantees.

"Looking to the future, the cost of the agricultural drone industry is continuing to decline, and China's advantageous new energy and consumer electronics technologies are also arming agricultural drones. It is believed that the scenarios of agricultural drones will also expand more broadly." Cheng Zhongyi made such a judgment on the industry trend.

Zigui is just an epitome of DJI Agriculture. Currently, AI is experiencing a great explosion, and its impact on thousands of industries is also quietly taking place. The subversive change in agriculture is happening in these gradual steps.