The economic effects of unmanned aerial vehicles in pesticide application: evidence from Chinese grain farmers

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a recent innovation in precision agriculture technology. They are being used in a wide range of agricultural practices, whereby pesticide application is one of the most common uses of UAVs in China’s agriculture. However, the economic effects of UAVs in pesticide application have not been sufficiently investigated. To address the gap, this paper used propensity score matching to evaluate the economic effects of UAV adoption on outcome variables including revenue, pesticide costs, time spent on pesticide application, and pesticide application frequency based on a dataset covering over 2000 grain farmers across 11 provinces of China. Furthermore, generalized propensity score matching was used to evaluate the heterogeneity of outcome variables arising from differing UAV adoption intensities. The empirical results show that adoption of UAV increased revenue by approximately 434–488 dollars per hectare and reduced the time spent on pesticide application in the range of 14.4–15.8 h per hectare. Depending on the area with use of UAVs for pesticide spraying, UAV adoption has heterogeneous impacts on grain farmers’ revenue and the time spent on pesticide application. In terms of marginal revenue and marginal time spent on pesticide application, the optimal area with use of UAVs for pesticide spraying is estimated to be 20 hectares of arable land.