Smart Plant Protection
Built on IoT, artificial intelligence, BeiDou positioning, and remote sensing, the solution watches crop pests and disease, applies pesticide only where it is needed, and supports greener control. Pests and disease hit about 6 billion mu-times of crops a year in China. Older practice is a walk through the field and a spray based on habit: the warning is late, the dose is high, and control is expensive. Pest lamps, spore traps, and weather stations feed the network. AI counts species and numbers from the images. A plant-protection drone with a variable nozzle sprays from a prescription map, and pesticide use can fall by more than 30%.
It covers field crops, cash crops, and protected agriculture. It forecasts how an outbreak will move, reminds the grower of the right window, and suggests a spray plan. It sits inside the smart agriculture platform and can read weather, soil, and irrigation, so monitoring, warning, control, and traceability are one chain. New farm operators and plant-protection service teams get more work done, and the control holds better.
Where the work breaks down
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs puts annual grain loss from pests and disease at about 10–15% of output, and the economic loss above 100 billion yuan. Monitoring is late — a person can only walk so much ground, and the outbreak is often already under way when it is seen. Spraying is blunt — a uniform pass over the whole field doses healthy ground as well, and pesticide use efficiency is only about 36%, well below developed countries. People are scarce — rural labor is older, and plant-protection work is hard to staff and expensive. The record is thin — pest counts, weather, and what was sprayed are not kept in a way that supports a decision or a trace.
Policy and the standards
The National Agricultural Green Development Plan for the 14th Five-Year Plan sets a 2025 goal of continued decline in pesticide use and a steady rise in green-control coverage. The Action Plan for Reducing Pesticide Use and Raising Efficiency asks for precise application and unified control. GB/T 24689, Plant protection machinery — Sprayers, and NY/T 3213, Technical specification for plant-protection UAV operations, are the references for the equipment and the work. Local subsidies are shifting toward drone spraying and green control.
What the numbers show
On sites that run it, pesticide use falls 30–50%, and the chemical bill by more than 20%. The window from finding the pest to treating it shrinks from 3–5 days to within 24 hours. A drone covers 30–60 times the area a person can in a day. Control is more even on the target, and efficacy rises 15–25%. For a grower at scale, payback is about 2–3 years, in money and in the field.
