According to CleanTechnica, agricultural spray drones in China are no longer an emerging technology. They have become standard farm equipment, and the numbers reflect that: China entered 2026 with about 309,000 plant-protection drones, and those aircraft performed roughly 203 million hectare-treatments over the course of 2025.
The same report says this level of activity is roughly 30 times higher than what the U.S. is doing in agricultural drone work. That comparison highlights how far ahead China is in deploying drones for crop protection at commercial scale.
This is a single-source analysis, so there are no differing sources to compare. Still, the scale of the reported figures makes clear that agricultural drone use in China has moved from pilot projects to routine operations.