Farming trends

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.

Full autonomy is still ahead, but satellite-guided steering already pays off: less overlap, less fuel, less fatigue.

• USA: autosteer covers 58% of corn acreage and 55% of soybean acreage, but only 10% of the smallest farms use it.
• Russia: Cognitive Pilot sold 312 kits in 2023 and 405 in the first quarter of 2024.
• Deere promises fully autonomous corn and soybean production by 2030.
• Monarch Tractor shut down in 2025; Caterpillar bought its assets.

What it means for you: Start with a kit for your own tractor; buy a robot tractor only with local service.

With no plowing, cover crops and crop rotation, soil builds up organic matter and water, and machinery makes fewer passes.

• Conservation agriculture: 205 million ha, 14.7% of the world’s cropland (2018/19).
• Russia and Ukraine: 6.9 million ha, up from 0.1 million ha ten years earlier.
• Cover crops in the USA: ≈7.3 million ha (2022), 17% more than in 2017.

What it means for you: Switch over part of a field at a time and compare with a control: the soil needs several seasons.

Milking robots are routine, laser weeders pay off in vegetables, and harvesting robots are still in pilots.

• Lely: 50,000 Astronaut robots, ≈3 million cows in 50 countries (2024).
• A laser weeder costs from ≈€1 million and saves up to ≈€800 per hectare a year compared with hand weeding.
• AgXeed: about a hundred robot tractors at work (2025).
• Strawberry pickers are still scaling up: Dogtooth raised more than £14 million (2026).

What it means for you: Buy mature robots with service nearby; pilot-stage ones only as an experiment.

Precise gene edits without foreign DNA speed up breeding. One country after another is separating such varieties from GMOs.

• Japan: a high-GABA tomato on sale since 2021.
• England: precision plant breeding rules in force since 13.11.2025.
• EU: the new regulation entered into force on 16.07.2026 and applies from 17.07.2028.
• Russia: 67.6% of seeds are domestically bred; the target is 75% by 2030.

What it means for you: A variety suited to your climate is the cheapest yield technology there is; check each country’s rules for new varieties.

Solar panels over the beds and biogas from manure turn a farm from an energy consumer into an energy producer.

• Agrivoltaics: more than 14 GW worldwide (2021), up from 2.9 GW in 2018.
• Europe: ≈21,000 biogas plants and ≈22 billion m³ of biogas and biomethane (2024).

What it means for you: Start with what runs in the daytime: pumps, cooling, ventilation. Diesel is the backup.

Less fertilizer, less water, fewer emissions — and payment for verified reductions. Vietnam’s rice is the first to try this at scale.

• Vietnam: the “1 million ha” program of low-emission rice by 2030.
• By March 2026: 354,800 ha, 197% of the first-phase plan.
• The World Bank approved $33.3 million (up to $40 million) in carbon payments to rice farmers.
• According to participants’ reports: yields +12%, spending on fertilizer and crop protection −40%.

What it means for you: Carbon income takes field records and protocols: no data, no payment.