The New York Times Spent 10 Minutes On AI Farming And Forgot The Drones Spraying The Fields

The New York Times Magazine published a feature on June 5 about the technology rewiring American agriculture, and the one machine actually flying over these fields barely made the cut. Robotic milkers, laser weeders, and driverless tractors each got a farmer, a photo essay, and a few hundred words. Spray drones got a single clause: “drones map moisture levels in soil.” That was it. The piece ran long, a 10-minute read on what the writers called the fourth agricultural revolution, and treated the fastest-growing category of farm robotics as a footnote.

I have been covering agricultural drones long enough to know this is not a small miss. The U.S. agricultural drone market was worth roughly 506 million dollars in 2024 and is on track to pass 1.7 billion by 2030, growing at about 23 percent a year. Spray drones are the engine of that growth. When a national publication frames the AI farming story around a 1.2-million-dollar laser machine and skips the 18,000-dollar drone that does a version of the same job from the air, readers walk away with a distorted map of where this technology is actually going.

The omission is stranger because one of the Times’s own subjects handed the writers the drone story and they walked past it.

The Onion Farmer’s Herbicide Problem Has A Drone-Shaped Answer

Steven Gill, the California onion grower profiled with his LaserWeeder in The New York Times Magazine, told the writers why he bought the machine. One of his major herbicides “went off the market,” he said, and his herbicides are “going away because they’re overregulated.” He grows onions. The herbicide the EPA pulled with an emergency suspension in August 2024, then canceled outright that October, was DCPA, sold as Dacthal, and federal regulators flagged it as especially important to broccoli and onion growers. Gill did not name the chemical in the interview, but the timeline and the crop line up cleanly.

Here is the part the Times left on the table. Losing a broadcast herbicide is exactly the problem spray drones are built to soften. Instead of treating an entire bed, a drone equipped with AI weed detection sprays only the patches that need it. DJI Agriculture’s head of global sales, Yuan Zhang, has said targeted spot-spraying of weed patches with these drones cuts herbicide use by up to 35 percent compared with broadcast application. Researchers at the University of Florida’s Range Cattle Research and Education Center have been spraying pasture herbicides from drones at 2.5 gallons per acre against the 20 gallons per acre a ground rig burns through. When a chemistry disappears or gets restricted, the farmer who can apply less of what remains, more precisely, is the one who keeps farming. That is a drone story sitting inside a laser story, and it went unwritten.

Agras Drones Use AI To Follow The Ground The Times Said Couldn’t Be Digitized

The feature opened with a line about how “you can’t digitize an ear of corn,” a nod to the messy physical reality of farming that technology supposedly struggles with. Terrain is the perfect example, and it is precisely what modern spray drones have solved. The DJI Agras T100, launched globally in July 2025 and shown at Agritechnica in November, uses LiDAR and binocular vision to read the contours of a field and hold a constant height above the canopy as the land rises and falls.

This is the AI the Times kept gesturing at without locating. The drone is not following a flat preset altitude. It is sensing slope, adjusting in real time, and bending its spray pattern to the actual shape of the ground, on hillsides a tractor cannot safely climb. The T100 carries a 100-liter (26.4-gallon) tank, sprays up to 40 liters (10.6 gallons) per minute with a four-nozzle setup, and runs full-mile passes with obstacle sensing out to 200 feet. Variable-rate application lets it dial the dose up or down across a single field. Glenn Brake’s robotic milker in Pennsylvania adjusts to each cow’s teat position, and the Times called that AI. An Agras adjusting its flight and flow to each meter of terrain is the same category of intelligence, applied to the part of the field the writers said you couldn’t digitize.

Drone Adoption Is Climbing Faster Than The Tools The Times Chose To Feature

Spray drones are not a fringe experiment waiting for validation. DJI controls roughly 80 percent of U.S. agricultural spray-drone sales, and a Michigan State University study this past fall found farmers are adopting drones faster than almost any prior agricultural technology. The American Farm Bureau Federation has pegged the return at around 12 dollars per acre for corn drone applications. Contractors now run spraying as a standalone business; growers reach for drones on post-rain applications when fields are too wet for a tractor and on terrain that booms cannot reach.

State governments are funding it directly. North Dakota committed 300,000 dollars in 2025 to AI-equipped drones for early detection and treatment of invasive weeds. That is the public sector betting on exactly the see-and-spray future the Times reserved for ground machines. A reader of that feature would never guess that the aerial version is already commercial, already subsidized, and already outselling most of what shared the page.

The Regulatory Story Is The Most Interesting Part, And It’s Missing Too

The richest angle the Times skipped is the collision between drone adoption and federal policy. On December 22, 2025, the FCC added all foreign-made unmanned aircraft systems to its Covered List, blocking new equipment authorizations for DJI and other foreign manufacturers on a going-forward basis. The roughly 80 percent of the spray-drone market that runs on DJI hardware suddenly faced a wall on buying new models, even as the drones already in the field kept their authorizations and stayed legal to fly.

So here is the actual shape of American AI farming in mid-2026. The Times profiled a fourth agricultural revolution in which the single fastest-growing robotics category is also the one Washington is trying to choke off at the import dock. American-made alternatives from companies like Hylio exist, but they run two to five times the price of comparable DJI hardware, and at least one upstate New York spray contractor has said publicly he may close if Chinese drones become unavailable. That tension, real money, real farmers, real policy, was a better story than a feel-good tour of milking robots. It is the one a drone reporter would have led with.

DroneXL’s Take

I do not think the Times got anything wrong. Brake’s milker, Gill’s LaserWeeder, and Josh Morrow’s autonomous mowers are all real, and the reporting on them was good. The problem is what got cropped out of the frame. When I covered the global launch of the Agras T100, T70P, and T25P last July, the through-line was that spray drones had crossed from novelty into infrastructure. Leaving them out of a long 2026 survey of farm AI is like writing about the electric vehicle transition and only mentioning hybrids.

The delta worth naming is who gets to tell the technology story. Agricultural drones carry baggage a milking robot never will. The same machines I write about as precision tools are the ones the FBI started worrying about after 15 spray drones were stolen in New Jersey this spring. That dual-use weight may be part of why a mainstream feature reached for the cuddlier robot with googly eyes instead of the aircraft that can put liquid on a GPS target from a parking lot. A laser that zaps a weed is a clean image. A drone that sprays a field is a more complicated one, and complicated is harder to photograph for a Sunday magazine.

What I will be watching is the courtroom, not the next product launch. DJI has filed suit against the FCC over the Covered List designation, and that case will decide whether the 80-percent-share platform American farmers actually use can keep reaching the U.S. market. The FCC’s one-year exemption for Blue UAS and qualified domestic products runs through January 1, 2027, which sets a real date on when the policy picture either hardens or shifts. Whether the next national feature on AI farming can keep ignoring the aircraft over the field depends a lot on how those two processes land. By the time someone writes the 2027 version of this story, the drones will be impossible to leave out, one way or another.

Sources: The New York Times Magazine, Grand View Research, U.S. EPA, Federal Communications Commission, DJI Agriculture, Michigan State University, American Farm Bureau Federation.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.