3,000 crop spraying drones help Chinese farmers fly into the future

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.

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.