Grow the best — from garden bed to hectare.

In five years the drone has gone from a curiosity to a working tool: spraying, fertilizing, seeding and imaging. Especially where fields are small, wet or on slopes.

• More than 600,000 DJI ag drones in 100+ countries (company data, end of 2025).
• China: more than 300,000 drones and ≈30.7 million ha treated a year (2025).
• Russia: ≈600,000 ha treated in 2025; the target is ≈2 million ha a year by 2028.
• Vietnam: about 7,000 ag drones (census of 01.07.2025).

What it means for you: On smaller areas it’s cheaper to hire a service: your own drone pays off from ≈400 ha treated a year.

A climate computer, supplemental lighting, substrate and beneficial insects: a greenhouse grows many times more than open ground and uses less water per kilogram.

• The Netherlands: ≈48 kg of tomatoes per m² a year (2024), a yield 13 times the world average.
• Almeria: 31,600 ha of low-cost plastic-film greenhouses and €4.1 billion in exports a season.
• Vietnam: 112,300 ha of greenhouses and net houses, 27 times more than in 2016.
• Russia: 3,460 ha of winter greenhouses and 1.66 million t of vegetables (2025).

What it means for you: For Southern Russia and the tropics, the Almeria model — a low-cost greenhouse and good management — is a closer fit than Dutch glass.

Droughts and salt make water a farm’s most important resource. Drip, sensors and recycled water are becoming the norm.

• Drip irrigation gets ≈90% of the water to the roots; furrow irrigation, ≈60% (FAO).
• Israel sends ≈90% of its treated wastewater to agriculture.
• Mekong Delta, the 2019–2020 drought: 41,900 ha of rice hit by salt, 96,000 families without water.

What it means for you: Put in a meter: water saved on one field often goes to new fields, and the region as a whole saves nothing.

Free imagery, sensors and apps turn a field into a map: where it’s sick, where it’s short of nitrogen, where there’s too much water.

• Sentinel-2: an image every 5 days, down to 10 m per pixel — free.
• 49% of farmers use at least one agtech tool (a survey of 5,500 farmers in 10 countries, 2026).
• 17% of the farmers surveyed use generative AI.
• Bayer FieldView: more than 100 million ha of fields in 23 countries (11.2024).

What it means for you: Start with free maps; test variable application rates on strips first — results vary widely across studies.

Biostimulants, biocontrol and beneficial insects are no longer exotic: nearly one farmer in two uses them.

• The biostimulant market: $4.47 billion (2025), growing ≈10% a year.
• The biocontrol market: $9.8 billion, ≈$15 billion by 2032.
• 48% of the farmers surveyed use biostimulants, 41% use biocontrol (2026).
• Almeria: beneficial insects protect 28,600 ha of greenhouses.

What it means for you: Leave an untreated check strip: that’s how you see whether a product works on your field.

Skyscraper farms under LEDs raised billions of dollars, and many have closed: light and climate cost more than the business plans promised.

• Plenty: bankruptcy in 2025 after ≈$1 billion in investment.
• Bowery: shut down in 2024 after more than $700 million in investment.
• AeroFarms: bankruptcy in 2023; Infarm pulled out of Europe.
• Japan’s Spread works: 30,000 heads of lettuce a day on an automated farm.

What it means for you: Only microgreens, salad greens and herbs — and only with a sales contract.