Drones are carrying out a "going to the mountains and the countryside" campaign

The picture shows XAG's plant protection drone operating on farmland in Xinjiang. Photo by: XAG founder @彭斌

DJI recently released an agricultural plant protection drone, the MG-1 (from the name, there will be more products in the same series in the future); yesterday, another well-known drone manufacturer in the industry, Zero Control, also announced the release of an agricultural drone , the Guardian Z10.

These two top domestic drone manufacturers released agricultural drones together within a few days, which made many people in the industry smell a kind of "big news": Is the market for agricultural drones about to explode?

Everyone vaguely smelled a little bit of the "eve of the outbreak"

Why do you say "vaguely"?

"We know that DJI is making agricultural drones, but it is a bit unexpected that it launched a plant protection drone at this time, because winter is the off-season for agricultural machinery sales. If it is launched at this time, there may be no orders in the next two or three months." Kong Xiangyu, the marketing director of Zero Control, said. The release of Zero Control's "Guardian" at this time was more or less influenced by DJI's MG-1.

The reporter heard from a drone industry practitioner that he had seen DJI's prototype a year ago. In the drone industry, such news between major manufacturers is basically not a secret.

Kong Xiangyu said that he still has no idea what DJI wants to do with its crop protection drone, how to sell it, or to whom. Not much information has been revealed online, and the price has not been announced. Some foreign media have estimated that the price of DJI's MG-1 should be around US$15,000. Kong Xiangyu said, "It has some reference value." UAV agents on Taobao have also given the MG-1 a pre-sale price of 96,000.

According to Kong Xiangyu's understanding, DJI may be trying some new business growth points. After all, the company has reached this scale and has the support of capital, "there are too many people to report to"; and Zero Degree has added more than 20 industry application products this year, and "Guardian" is just one of them. The user portrait of this series is not very clear - although there is no price, it is also at the level of tens of thousands of RMB, and ordinary farmers will not pay for it. Only intensively operated institutions can recover the costs, such as large farms, agricultural service companies, and agricultural machinery companies that sell agricultural equipment.

However, the good news is that the "Guardian Z10" has not yet officially entered mass production, but has already received a large order from an agricultural service company.

Compared with manual spraying, drones are more efficient and use less pesticides. When the two are combined, the cost advantage is very prominent. Peng Bin of XAG introduced in "Yi Xi" that using drones to spray pesticides can save about 30% of the cost. For example, one acre of cotton field costs 80 to 100 yuan a year to spray pesticides, but XAG can do it for 50 yuan; the overall spraying efficiency is about 4 times that of manual labor.

Another more realistic problem is that there is a "generational gap" among farmers - a large number of people born after the 1990s or even after the 1980s have left the countryside, and there are fewer and fewer people with agricultural labor skills. The mechanization of agriculture is imperative in the future.

So even though it is not clear how and what process agricultural drones will enter farmland, one thing most people agree on is that agricultural drones will have a wide range of uses. The reporter randomly asked two investors about the investment value of agricultural drones. One of them said he was observing, while the other said directly, "I have already invested."

What are the barriers to agricultural drones?

"First, the technical barrier of agricultural drones is mainly the lack of the drone's 'brain'. Agricultural applications are different from aerial photography. The flight area cannot be selected, which requires a higher level of environmental perception and intelligent control. Specifically, automatic detection and matching of terrain, automatic detection and classification of obstacles, real-time re-planning of spraying paths, centimeter-level ultra-high precision positioning and control, etc." said Dr. Qi Juntong, CEO of Yifei Intelligent Control.

Once a drone takes off in a vast field, it is like a bird flying into a forest. It is impossible to control it remotely. It must be able to automatically plan the path (if the path is accidentally interrupted, it must be able to resume transmission from the breakpoint) and avoid obstacles. In addition, since the sprayed pesticide is atomized, if the drone is too high above the crop, the pesticide may evaporate before it touches the leaves. Therefore, the aircraft must fly at a height of one or two meters above the crop - GPS alone cannot achieve accurate altitude positioning. XAG spent a lot of time solving these problems.

XAG still does not directly sell agricultural drone equipment. Peng Bin mentioned in a public speech that they also tried to sell drones to farmers at the beginning, but farmers did not know how to operate drones and were not interested in the spraying process. They only cared about whether the pesticides could be sprayed on the ground. When they turned to the agricultural machinery market, suppliers who sold tractors also expressed their willingness, but it was difficult to understand, and the progress of promotion and education was extremely slow. "If we push drones to farmland in this way, it may be five years later, and by then we may have gone bankrupt."

In addition to the technical barriers of the technology itself, there are also some time barriers. The characteristics of agriculture itself need some time to run in. For example, the dosage of pesticides will definitely not have a pest control effect if it is too low, but the more the better is not necessarily true. It is possible that the original intention was to kill aphids, but in the end, the aphids' natural enemy, ladybugs, were also killed. For agricultural products that need to be ingested or directly contact the skin, too much dosage may even bring safety risks.

XAG chose to start their experiment in the cotton fields of Xinjiang, which was later proved to be a very wise choice: the cotton fields in Xinjiang are huge and flat and concentrated. During the high-incidence period of insect pests, cotton needs to be sprayed with pesticides almost every day or every other day. On the one hand, the geographical conditions are suitable for mechanical operation, on the other hand, it consumes a huge amount of manpower and material resources, and on the other hand, there is an organization willing to pay for it - the Construction Corps. Almost all the conditions required for the application of agricultural drones are met.

With these barriers, XAG may not feel much pressure from Zero and DJI launching drones. "Is SF Express worried about Jiangling launching a new truck?" XAG CEO Peng Bin answered a question from a Leifeng.com reporter. SF Express and Jiangling, a logistics company and an automobile company, Peng Bin used these two analogies to imply that what they do is completely different from DJI and Zero.

According to industry insiders, XAG has adopted a very "heavy" approach, namely, building a "conservation station": a relatively fixed place, a few people, a few drone equipment, a total cost of about 600,000 to 700,000 yuan, and a conservation station covers a certain area of ​​farmland. In a sense, XAG has become an agricultural service company, contracting the pesticide spraying work of a farm and being responsible for the results. As for what machine to use or even whether to use a machine, the person who pays the bill does not need to ask. Let's imagine: In the future, will XAG become the JD.com or SF Express in the field of agricultural automation?

DJI and Zero are unlikely to invest in building such service capabilities. They are more likely to become equipment suppliers. Other companies, such as Yifei Intelligent Control, are committed to providing flight control solutions for agricultural drones. Now many system integrators, airframe manufacturers, spraying operators, etc. want to get a share of the agricultural automation field, and these companies are all buyers of drone flight control solutions. It is said that Yifei Intelligent Control has signed and plans to sign more than 100 contracts during the Shenzhen High-Tech Fair, with an estimated contract value of millions.

Let's draw a pie

China has 2 billion mu of arable land. Excluding terrain that is not suitable for mechanical operations, the area is still considerable. If an average of 50 yuan is spent on pesticide spraying per mu of land each year, the size of this market...

The reporter recalled Chairman Mao’s call decades ago: Go to the countryside. There is a vast world and much to do.