This Day, That Year

Item from Aug 28, 1988, in China Daily: China will become a large and attractive market for agricultural airplanes by 2000. It is estimated that by 2000, the country will need 1,000 agricultural planes as agriculture comes to depend more on modern management and production techniques.

With the growing modernization of Chinese agricultural, demand for advanced devices has been growing significantly.

Last year, the Agricultural Development Bank of China and the Ministry of Agriculture signed an agreement to lend at least 3 trillion yuan ($451 billion) by 2020 for the modernization of the country’s agriculture sector.

The government has also issued policies to promote the use of modern agricultural machinery, which includes offering subsidies to encourage the use of drones.

Drones are now widely used as crop-dusters to eliminate pests by spraying pesticides on farmland and orchards.

In 2015, commercial drone manufacturer DJI Innovation Technology Co launched its first farm-specific drone, the MG-1. It can spray an area of 4,000 to 6,000 square meters in 10 minutes, 40 to 60 times faster than manual operations.

According to a report by SWS Research, agricultural drones have clear efficiency advantages over manual methods, including more economical use of pesticides and lower water consumption.

Because drones are used on less than 2 percent of the 122 million hectares of arable land in China, there is huge market potential for their application in the agricultural sector, according to consulting firm iResearch. It said in a report that the market scale of agricultural drones in China is expected to reach 20 billion yuan ($3 billion) by 2025.