Forecast of the development trend of China’s agricultural plant protection UAV industry in 2023

The basic farmland area of China is about 2027 million mu. Assuming that the proportion of UAV spraying pesticide in China will reach 10% in 2022, the price of single machine will decrease from 500000 yuan to 440000 yuan year by year, and the operating efficiency will increase from 100 mu/hour to 160 mu/hour year by year. It is predicted that the accumulated market space of UAV for agricultural plant protection in China will exceed 130000 in the next six years, with a total amount of more than 60 billion yuan. If the UAV operation market is considered, the potential market space is larger.

The coverage rate of plant protection UAVs in China’s farmland is only 2%. Compared with the 40-50% coverage rate achieved in Japan, UAVs are not popular in China’s agricultural industry. On January 16, 2017, the Director of the Department of Agricultural Mechanization of the Ministry of Agriculture mentioned for the first time that the plant protection UAV would be subsidized as a pilot. Previously, some major agricultural provinces have included plant protection UAVs in agricultural machinery subsidies as an attempt, but did not include plant protection services in the scope of subsidies. The introduction of subsidy policy is conducive to promoting the further development of agricultural and forestry plant protection UAVs. The market scale of agricultural and forestry plant protection UAVs is expected to reach about 15 billion yuan by 2023.

The outline of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan proposes to accelerate the development of smart agriculture and promote the digital transformation of agricultural production, operation and management services. Improve the agricultural science and technology innovation system, innovate the agricultural technology extension service mode, and build smart agriculture. The state vigorously develops smart agriculture, which will benefit the development of plant protection UAVs. In addition, with the continuous maturity and landing of new intelligent technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and so on, the plant protection UAV technology will also continue to update and iterate, and the related products will develop in a more intelligent and humanized direction, thus promoting the deepening application of plant protection UAVs in the agricultural field.