Crop Spraying Drone: From Crop Dusters to ABB Ideas

A crop spraying drone carries a tank of crop protection product over a field and applies it from the air. Farmers use one where wet soil, steep ground or a small, oddly shaped field keeps a tractor out. In the United States drones treated 16.4 million acres in 2025, more than four times the 2023 figure, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. This post follows the job from the first crop dusting flight in 1921 and Yamaha's unmanned helicopters for Japanese rice farmers to the spray drones and spot spraying robots in this autumn's news. It ends with where ABB robots could fit and what still holds the work back.

A DJI Agras T50 spray drone demonstrates its sprayers during an event at the Universidad Nacional de Pilar, September 2025. Photo: Blervis / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How crop dusting took to the air

Spraying from the air began as an experiment in Ohio. On 3 August 1921 a US Army Curtiss Jenny biplane, modified at McCook Field in Dayton under the engineer Etienne Dormoy and flown by John A. Macready, spread lead arsenate over a catalpa farm near Troy to kill catalpa sphinx caterpillars. The US Department of Agriculture ran the test together with the Army Signal Corps research station at McCook Field, and it was judged highly successful. It is the first known use of a heavier than air machine to spread such products. The name crop dusting dates from this period, when real dust was spread over the crops.

The first crop dusting experiment near Troy, Ohio, on 3 August 1921, flown by Lt. John A. Macready with a hopper designed by Etienne Dormoy. Photo: Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station (1922) via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A business grew out of it within three years. Huff-Daland Crop Dusting began the first commercial operations in 1924 in Macon, Georgia, co-founded by the McCook test pilot Lt. Harold R. Harris, and dusting with insecticides and fungicides spread slowly through the Americas in the 1930s. In 1951 Leland Snow designed the S-1, the first aircraft built for aerial application, and Grumman's G-164 Ag-Cat followed in 1957. Today's agricultural aircraft can carry as much as 3,000 litres of liquid. Worry about spray drift grew with them, and in 2009 the European Union banned most aerial spraying of pesticides, leaving a few tightly restricted exceptions.

A Huff-Daland Duster biplane in the markings of Huff-Daland Dusters of Monroe, Louisiana, on museum display. Photo: Cliff / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Japan took the pilot out of the aircraft. Fixed-wing crop dusters had flown there for years, but most Japanese farms were too small for them to work efficiently, and manned helicopters were very expensive. In 1987 Yamaha released the R-50 unmanned helicopter to help rice farmers apply pesticides at a time of labour shortages, and its successor, the R-MAX, followed in the 1990s. The petrol-powered R-MAX carried 28 to 31 kg, flew for about an hour and was flown by remote control within the pilot's line of sight. By 2015 the R-MAX fleet had logged more than two million flight hours, and the US Federal Aviation Administration approved it that year.

A Yamaha R-MAX unmanned helicopter, the type developed for crop spraying on small Japanese farms. Photo: Gtuav / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Spray drones and spot sprayers in 2026

The latest US figures came out this month. On 15 October the American Farm Bureau Federation reported that drones treated 3.7 million acres in 2023, 10.3 million in 2024 and 16.4 million in 2025, up 59% in a year. FAA data showed about 5,500 registered agricultural spray drones in 2025, linked to 2,588 operations holding Part 137 agricultural aircraft status. Farmers hire them for wet fields, rough ground, small plots and jobs with a tight timing window, and flying the drone remotely cuts the applicator's contact with the chemicals. Custom drone work costs about $12 to $18 an acre for row crops, against $6 to $12 for a ground rig and $10 to $18 for an airplane.

Shannon Kern of Leading Edge Technology with a spray drone at an aerial pesticide application training in Davis, California, 2018. Photo: USDA Forest Service via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

On the ground, cameras now decide where the chemical goes. Coggan Farms near Meandarra in Queensland runs two SwarmFarm SwarmBots, each with an 18-metre boom, Weed-It spot spraying cameras and a 3,000-litre tank, and in 2025 it added AutoFill so the robots refill their own tanks. The family told Future Farming in September that fallow spraying typically uses about 85% less chemical. Ecorobotix said on 12 October that more than 100 of its ARA precision sprayers now work in US onion fields, where one Washington grower puts on 3 to 12 gallons an acre instead of 40 to 50 for a broadcast spray. In Europe, Kubota announced a deal in October to sell Kilter's AX-1, a robot that treats each weed with tiny drops of herbicide.

An Ecorobotix ARA precision sprayer on a tractor, working over rows of young plants. Photo: Ecorobotix press kit

ABB does not build spray drones or field sprayers, and it has announced no farm spraying project, so any role for its robots here is a possibility. The nearest thing ABB sells is in the paint shop. Its PixelPaint system, shown in 2022 on IRB 5500 paint robots, uses a print head with 1,000 nozzles that tracks very close to a car body, so all the paint lands on the car with no airborne mist and no masking. Spot spraying has the same aim of putting liquid on the target and nowhere else. ABB coordinated the PixelPaint head with its RobotStudio software, an offline programming and simulation tool in which robot paths are planned and tested before a cell is built.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot carrying the PixelPaint print head, which puts paint on a car body without overspray. Photo: ABB

Where crop spraying drones go next

China shows how far the numbers can climb. It entered 2026 with about 309,000 agricultural drones, which carried out about 203 million hectare treatments during 2025, while US farmers completed about 6.6 million, 3% of China's total on a similar amount of farmland. The next gains will come from cutting the time a drone spends on the ground. DJI's Dock 4, launched on 14 October for inspection drones, swaps a battery in 25 seconds and gets the aircraft back in the air within 45. A spray drone has to land for a full tank as well as a fresh battery, and SwarmFarm's AutoFill shows that refilling can already be automated on the ground.

A DJI Agras T50 spray drone in a demonstration flight, September 2025. Photo: Blervis / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

An industrial arm could earn a place at that stop, although nobody has announced such a station. ABB's IRB 1300 comes in IP67 and Foundry Plus 2 versions with every electrical part sealed against liquids and dust, and it carries 7 to 11 kg depending on reach. A sealed arm of that kind could swap battery packs and connect refill lines at the edge of a field. For orchards, small farms and large gardens, the change will mostly arrive as a hired service, at about $18 to $35 an acre for specialty crops. How the aircraft themselves are built is covered in our post on drone manufacturing.

An ABB IRB 1300 in its Foundry Plus 2 version, sealed for work with liquids and dust, inside a wet production cell. Photo: ABB

Cost is still the first obstacle, since drone work costs more per acre than a ground rig. Buying the aircraft has also become harder in the US. The American Spray Drone Coalition says sales of new spray drones fell 59% in 2025, to about 3,711, a drop it blames on customs holds on DJI shipments since October 2024, and it has asked the FCC to keep Part 137 spray drones out of a proposed ban on foreign "military-grade" drones. Commercial operators need licences and certification, and they must know agronomy, pest and disease control, application technology and pesticide law. A robot station at the field edge would add one more job to that list, because someone would have to program and maintain it.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com