How to choose an agricultural drone for your crop and field size
Payload, flight time and regulatory position decide the purchase. Application rate per hectare is fixed by law in most markets, which means the tank size is not a preference.
Start from the regulation, not the specification sheet. In most markets the maximum application rate per hectare is set by law and enforced at inspection, and that single number determines your tank size. If your jurisdiction permits 12 litres per hectare and you need to cover a 10-hectare block, you need 120 litres of spray in the air per pass, and a 25-litre platform achieves that in five battery cycles while a 16-litre platform achieves it in eight. Buy the smaller tank and the job takes an extra three hours of flying per block, which is paid for in fuel, battery cycles and pilot hours.
Next, check whether the regulation permits aerial application near the public at all. Some markets restrict flights within a certain distance of housing, which in fragmented farmland means very little usable area. Some require a specific nozzle type or a drift buffer, and some require a documented environmental assessment. A platform that cannot be configured to meet the local rule is not cheaper at purchase, because the compliance work happens somewhere else and always costs more.
The third filter is working speed. The platform should fly at the speed your existing ground equipment travels, because that is what determines how long the job takes. A grower whose tractor works at 8 kilometres per hour loses an entire working day if the aircraft flies at 12, because the battery is recharged, the tank is refilled and the field is turned four times more often than necessary.
Finally, and this is the one most buyers skip, check the wind limit against your own site. The headline wind resistance figure is usually measured in a controlled condition. A field bordered by a tree line or a set of buildings will not offer that, and a platform specified at 10 metres per second is unusable at 6 in practice. Ask the supplier for the recommended operating speed as a function of wind, and apply your own site factor to it.
None of this is unusual or difficult, but each of these four checks will change which platform you should buy, and each is cheap to verify before an order rather than expensive to discover afterwards.
