Meet the man behind one of China’s biggest agricultural drone makers
- Demand for agricultural drones is rising because of labour shortages in China
- Agricultural drones are used for crop monitoring as well as pesticide spraying
On a road trip through Xinjiang in 2012, Peng Bin saw how ageing farmers laboured in vast cotton fields with heavy tanks of pesticides strapped to their backs, spraying the chemicals without any protection.
“I could smell the acrid stench of pesticide from afar and I thought maybe my unmanned aircraft could help,” said Peng, 37, founder and chief executive of XAG, one of China’s biggest makers of agricultural drones. “At least drone spraying would limit the farmers’ exposure to the chemicals.”
It is also more cost-effective, an important consideration for the labour-starved agricultural industry in China. In general, a drone can do the same spraying job in 1/30th the time, and the more challenging the terrain, the more advantage a drone has.
Soon after the trip, Peng focused on producing drones for industrial use, instead of the consumer devices that hobbyists use to take holiday videos. That move proved prescient as demand for pesticide and fertiliser spraying soared with the decline in farm labour. Young people would rather work in factories, or wait tables and clean homes in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, than toil in the fields.
For Peng, his chosen career marks a full circle of sorts for his family. Peng’s parents moved from the countryside to Sanming city in China’s southern Fujian province early on.
