Why can't drones enjoy agricultural machinery subsidy policies?

Nowadays, drones are playing an increasingly large role in agricultural production, and many large-scale growers want to buy a drone for controlling rice and orchard and forest pests and diseases. However, drone prices are currently rather high, with the cheapest one costing around 100,000 yuan, and high-performance drones selling for as much as 1 million yuan each, which puts many ordinary farmers off. Some farmers report that one important reason drones are so expensive is that they cannot enjoy national agricultural machinery subsidies, and all costs must be borne by the farmers who buy them.

Liu Kexiang, an expert at the Tianjin Agricultural Plant Protection Station, introduced that practice has proved that drones play an increasingly large role in agricultural production, greatly saving manpower, materials and money. According to the design principle, one drone can cover more than 300 mu per day, dozens of times that of manual work. In addition, drones have a large operating area when spraying pesticides, spray evenly, and achieve good control results. As of now, among the districts and counties of this city that have agriculture, only a very small number of large-scale growers have bought drones, with the total not exceeding 10 units, which simply cannot meet the needs of current agricultural production. If national agricultural machinery subsidies could be obtained, the purchase cost could be greatly reduced, and the number of farmers buying them would increase substantially.

An expert from the Municipal Agricultural Machinery Service Center told reporters that the reason agricultural drones have not been included in the agricultural machinery subsidy catalogue is that no national standard for agricultural drones has yet been officially issued. Because there is no relevant national standard, scientific testing of drone product performance cannot be carried out, and therefore they cannot enter the agricultural machinery subsidy catalogue. At present, all agricultural machinery included in national agricultural machinery subsidies has undergone professional testing. For this reason, they also hope that the relevant national departments will speed up the issuance of a national standard for drones, so that purchasers can receive drone purchase subsidies as soon as possible.

It is understood that an important reason the national standard for drones is currently difficult to bring out is that China adopted aerial spraying operations relatively late, and there has been a lack of systematic and in-depth research on relevant technical parameters of agricultural drones. These include: drone flight altitude, flight speed, amount of pesticide sprayed per unit area, pesticide concentration, and so on. In addition, compared with developed countries abroad, domestic drone spraying also has some gaps in areas such as the selectable pesticide varieties. At present, drone operations in various places are carried out according to the standards of production enterprises, but the results vary unevenly. (Chen Zhongquan)