The Global South is leading a drone revolution in agriculture: Video
In a reversal of traditional technology trends, countries in the Global South are pushing ahead in the development and rapid adoption of revolutionary agricultural drone technology.
The scale of this transformation was evident this week at DronTech Asia 2025. The expo highlighted the advances and growing popularity of drones, especially in farming. Over 300,000 agricultural drones now operate globally, treating more than 500 million hectares of farmland around the world. This is dramatically improving sustainability in the farming sector. A 2024 report by DJI found the use of drones reduced water usage by 210 million metric tons and pesticide usage by 47,000 metric tons. The study also calculated that drones decreased carbon emissions by 25.71 million metric tons.
Ben Belton, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute and lead author of a recent study published in Science, called the trend “a revolution in terms of how quickly it's happening, but also the implications that it has, in terms of agricultural productivity, greater efficiency in agrochemical use, and the labour savings it affords farmers”.
How are drones used in farming?
Agricultural drones fall into two main categories:
Sensor drones: These smaller drones are used for data collection, detecting early signs of poor crop health, pests, weeds, or diseases—often before human eyes can spot them.
Spreader drones: These larger drones are used to apply pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. Increasing payload capacity has also made them useful for spreading fertilisers and even seeds across fields.
Belton notes that spreader drones are currently having the most dramatic impact. “These are being used much more widely,” he says, “and are transforming farming practices on the ground.”
What does this revolution mean for farmers?
Many of the countries that have seen the rapid adoption of agricultural drones have experienced dramatic rural-to-urban migration. This has led to a labour shortage in farming communities. Often, farmers themselves are relatively elderly and struggle with physical work like spraying fertiliser and sowing seeds.
Belton says that in many of these countries, farming is already largely mechanized with tractors, power tillers and combine harvesters, but drones are taking this a step further, “I think of them in a way as being like flying tractors, so a tractor is the one machine, but there are many, many different implements that you can add onto a tractor to perform different functions”.
Belton also points out that drones reduce the direct exposure of farmers to pesticides, something that many of the interviewees for his study cited as a key factor in their adoption of drones.
How the Global South got ahead
In the early days of drone technology, the key developments were being made in the Global North. Companies commercialised drones for hobbyists to be used for photography and other leisure uses. Then Chinese company DJI became a leader in this field. It was DJI that then led the way in developing drones for agriculture, first smaller ‘sensors’ and then the bigger ‘spreaders’.
China’s well-established toy industry meant that it had a head start in mass production. Belton says, “There are also spillovers from other industries. So, for instance, the electric vehicle industry in China”. Batteries and LIDAR systems used for helping self-driving used in the EV industry could be used in drones.
There are now close to a million agricultural drones in use in China today. Other early adopters were Japan and Korea. From there, the technology spread rapidly to places like Thailand, Vietnam, Turkey and later Latin America. Now, drone technology is being implemented rapidly across North America.
What should we expect to see in the next 5-10 years?
Belton says that the drone revolution is far from over. In the next 5 to 10 years, he says, we are likely to see the integration of sensing and spraying capabilities into single drone units.
“You'll be able to go out and do the analytics and apply the inputs in a more targeted way. And so, you know, if that starts to happen, then there's really potential for a whole other order of benefits in terms of the increased precision and efficiency.”
As agricultural drones continue to evolve, the Global South is positioned to lead the next wave of global farming innovation.
This story is written and edited by the Global South World team, you can contact us here.
