SoftBank-backed drone maker wants every farmer to ‘have their own robot’

A SoftBank-backed agricultural drone start-up wants every farmer to “have their own robot” as it touts its pilotless crop sprayers as the answer to a dwindling workforce and rising temperatures.

XAG, the world’s second-largest agricultural drone maker by revenue behind Chinese compatriot DJI, has released a series of drones with docking stations that autonomously clean, recharge, refill and plan the spraying routes of vehicles.

Justin Gong, senior vice-president of XAG, told the FT that labour shortages and an ageing workforce were the biggest issues facing Chinese farms, but many of them could not rely on time-pressed drone pilots to spray their fields.

The advent of more extreme weather caused by climate change has sharpened the need for automated smart farms, he added.

“Every farmer in the future will have their own robot,” he said. “It’s going to be revolutionary because we think pilots are the biggest resistance to the drone industry right now.”

By the end of last year, China had issued 415,500 drone operator licences, up 68 per cent from the year before, according to official figures. While the number of pilots is growing, state media have reported that high demand has left some sectors grappling with shortages.

Time-pressed pilots were incentivised to spray as quickly as possible before moving on to the next farm, said Gong. Many were also reluctant to travel to remote locations.

Automation in farming is also being driven by rapid labour force shrinkage. “When [AI companies] talk about valuation or market scale, they talk about how many people you can replace,” said Gong. “We are the other side: how many people you will lose in the next five years — that is the market size.”

The UN has forecast that China’s working-age population, which peaked at 1bn in the 2010s, could shrink by nearly two-thirds by the end of the century. A decades-long rush of rural migrants to factories in cities has put farms at the sharp end of the demographic crisis.

Gong estimated about 12mn people moved from rural to urban areas each year, which meant China would need 3mn drones in the next three years. To cover all arable land, the country would need as many as 12mn drones, he said.

Sun Xi, secretary-general of the Global Summit on Sustainable Agriculture, an industry group, said agricultural drone usage was “very mature” in China and had government support, but smaller farms with limited capital and technical knowhow would struggle to adopt.

“In the end you have to look at costs,” he said, adding that farmers would only adopt technology if it was cheaper than traditional methods.

XAG sells its drones, vehicles and farm sensors to customers in nearly 70 countries including the US, Brazil and a number of African and south-east Asian nations.

Kay Wackwitz, chief executive of research group Drone Industry Insights, said although DJI had grown its share of the agricultural drone market rapidly in recent years, XAG’s easy-to-use systems gave them an edge with less tech-savvy farmers.

“Lowering the entry barrier is very, very important in this sector,” he said. “That, I think, is what XAG understood masterfully.”

The company, founded in 2007 as a consumer hobby brand, is preparing to list in Hong Kong. It was valued at about $1.5bn in a 2023 funding round, according to an estimate from Caplight. SoftBank holds a 12.9 per cent stake.

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Gong said farms outside China could require five to 10mn drones in the next decade to meet pressing labour crunches.

The US, which has heavily restricted the sale of new Chinese drone models, had slipped to the company’s second-largest overseas market, after Brazil, and was likely to become “more difficult” going forward, said Gong. But he added that XAG recently received regulatory approval to sell its latest model in the country.

Overall, the threat of climate change had softened the attitudes of even the most traditional farmers to new technologies such as drones, he said.

“Technology plus weather plus labour shortage, it’s all become very complex . . . to the farmers and they have a lot of pressure.”