In a Wuchang (五常) rice county, the busy season no longer means gangs of laborers wading through paddies with knapsack sprayers. A single operator launches a drone from a roadside, and within minutes a 90-kilogram payload of fertilizer is spread across a hectare. The machine is part of a fleet that, across China in 2025, numbered more than 320,000 operating agricultural drones.
That scale is not a projection. Shen Xiaojun (沈晓君), DJI Agriculture's global marketing head, told the 39th China Plant-Protection Fair that more than 320,000 agricultural drones were at work in China in 2025, up 52% year on year, completing 3.2 billion mu of plant-protection operations and lifting 3.5 million tons of farm materials. For the first time, the drones are not only spraying — they are becoming low-altitude freight.
Key takeaways
- 320,000+ DJI agricultural drones operated in China in 2025 (+52% YoY); 3.2 billion mu of operations; 3.5 million tons of materials lifted.
- In Heilongjiang, field-management mechanization hit ~95% in 2025, up from under 12% in 2015 — roughly an 8x jump tied to drone adoption; DJI has trained 45,000 local pilots.
- Globally, DJI Agriculture cumulative sales passed 500,000 units by October 2025; 2025 shipments exceeded 200,000, up from 2,000 in 2015 (a 100x rise).
- The new T100S (November 2025) is pitched as "L3 airborne autonomous driving" (空中智驾L3) with lidar-plus-radar fusion.
Why a drone became a "smart farm hand"
Precision agriculture (精准农业) in China has moved from slogan to routine. On winter wheat, the drone handles top-dressing, spraying and pest control during the short windows that matter; on rapeseed, orchards and vegetables it does the same. The appeal is concrete: fast takeoff and landing, precise application, and "human–machine separation" that keeps the operator off the chemicals. In flat grain regions the drone is now standard spring-field kit — one day scouting crop condition, the next spreading fertilizer by prescription map. On hillside orchards it has taken over the back-breaking "carry supplies up, carry fruit down" loop as low-altitude logistics.
The Heilongjiang proof point
Heilongjiang is China's largest grain province — 258 million mu of arable land, about one-ninth of the country's market grain. Field management there was long the weak link in mechanization. DJI's own figures show the provincial field-management mechanization coverage sat under 12% in 2015 and reached nearly 95% by 2025, a near eightfold climb. In Wuchang alone, a 4.463-million-mu rice county, DJI completed 4.253 million mu of operations in 2025 at over 95% cultivated-land penetration. Across the province DJI counted more than 33,000 active machines and close to 600 million mu of annual operations, and says it has trained 45,000 pilots — a new rural workforce.
From tool to "autopilot"
The hardware has changed shape. The T100S, released in November 2025, carries a 149.9 kg maximum takeoff weight, an 85-liter spray tank, a 90 kg spreading load and a 95 kg lifting load, with a 256-line lidar and upgraded millimeter-wave radar for spotting thin obstacles like power lines. DJI frames it as "L3 airborne autonomous driving" — conditionally autonomous, where the system can take over a flight and the operator steps in only when needed. The pitch is less "faster sprayer" and more "lower the skill floor": trajectory replay, automatic swing-damping on lifts, and obstacle avoidance let a trained operator, not a pilot, run a complex job.
Global spillover
DJI Agriculture's cumulative global sales passed 500,000 units by October 2025, and 2025 shipments topped 200,000 — against just 2,000 units shipped in 2015. Its network reaches more than 100 countries, with Brazil, Mexico, Thailand and Japan as priorities, and the company says it had trained over 70,000 overseas pilots by November 2025. Chinese subsidy data also shows DJI devices make up close to 90% of subsidized agricultural-drone units domestically, a mark of both market lead and policy tailwind.
Honest limitations
- The domestic 2025 figures (320,000 drones, 3.2 billion mu, 3.5 million tons) are a DJI executive's statement at an industry fair; we found no independent third-party audit of the counts.
- A "mu" (亩) is about 0.067 hectares. The 3.2 billion mu-times counts repeated spray passes, not unique land area, so it should not be read as 3.2 billion mu of distinct farmland.
- The 500,000 global cumulative and 200,000 2025 shipment numbers are DJI's own, reported via company and industry channels; the 100x growth from 2015 is a straight comparison of those figures.
- Beyond-visual-line-of-sight flight rules, rural connectivity and rural job shifts (fewer manual laborers, more trained operators) are real constraints the adoption story tends to understate.
What readers can do now
- Farmers: check local agricultural-machinery subsidy lists — DJI accounts for close to 90% of subsidized units — and ask about pilot-training programs before buying.
- Observers: track rural mechanization rates in the big grain provinces (Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jiangsu); those percentages are the real adoption signal, not launch keynotes.
- Overseas readers: Brazil and Mexico are the fastest-expanding markets outside China and the best window into how this model travels.