Young Touts Indiana FAA Test Site At Spray Drone Field Day While The Aircraft On The Tarmac Stay Chinese

Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) spent part of June 8 at the Southeast Purdue Ag Center in Butlerville, watching agricultural spray drones lift off at the Indiana Spray Drone Association Education Day. The visit gave a sitting U.S. senator a close look at the same machines that Hoosier farmers now use to seed and spray thousands of acres, and a platform to tie that work to Indiana’s new federal drone test site.

“Drones continue to be critical for the Hoosier ag industry, and Indiana’s new UAS test site will help ensure our drone ecosystem meets the industry’s growing needs,” Young said. The senator backed Indiana’s bid for the site through the winter, alongside the rest of the state’s congressional delegation, and the designation landed in January.

There is a gap in that picture worth naming up front. Roughly 80% of agricultural spray drone sales in the United States go to DJI, a Chinese manufacturer, with the rest split among other mostly Chinese platforms like XAG and a small domestic field. The same federal government celebrating the Indiana test site has spent the past six months cutting off the supply of exactly those aircraft. A field day full of working Agras units is a complicated backdrop for a policy built on moving the country away from Chinese drones.

Indiana Became The Ninth FAA UAS Test Site In January

The Federal Aviation Administration named the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma as new Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) test sites on January 8, 2026, the first additions to the program in nearly a decade. The two sites became the eighth and ninth in a network that already included Alaska, North Dakota, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Texas, and Virginia.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy framed that January announcement in competitive terms. “From delivering lifesaving medicine to surveying pipelines, drones are already reshaping industries and changing how people and products interact,” Duffy said at the time. “It’s our job to make sure the United States safely leads the way with this exciting technology, not China.” He added that the new sites would help the FAA “gather critical data and test new systems so we can safely unleash innovation in our skies.” Those remarks accompanied the designation, not the June field day, but they set the policy frame that Young’s visit operates inside.

The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 authorized the agency to designate up to two new ranges, and President Trump’s “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” executive order pushed the selection forward. The sites focus on Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations, increasingly autonomous flight, advanced air mobility, and counter-drone work. I covered Indiana’s push for the designation in December and the FAA’s announcement when it became official, so the field day reads as a victory lap on a win the delegation had already secured.

Indiana’s Drone Case Rests On Military Counter-UAS Muscle

Indiana won the designation largely on defense infrastructure, not agriculture. The state’s bid pointed to the Technology Readiness and Experimentation initiative at Camp Atterbury, the restricted airspace at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center, and counter-UAS work at Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane. Purdue University, with the first university-owned airport in the country and the world’s largest indoor motion-capture facility, anchored the academic side.

The headline demonstration came in August 2025, when Epirus used its Leonidas high-power microwave system at Camp Atterbury to neutralize a 49-drone swarm with a single electromagnetic pulse. That capability is what put Indiana on the federal selectors’ shortlist. The agricultural angle Young leaned on at Butlerville is real, but it was the supporting argument, not the lead one. The site’s stated emphasis runs toward industrial logistics, energy infrastructure, and the detect-and-avoid and interdiction testing that feeds national security requirements.

The Spray Drones At The Field Day Are Caught In The FCC Ban

Agricultural spray drones are the fastest-adopted machine in modern farming, and the market leader is Chinese. A Michigan State University study found DJI holds roughly 80% of US agricultural spray drone sales, and FAA registrations of agricultural drones jumped from about 1,000 in January 2024 to around 5,500 by mid-2025. The Indiana Spray Drone Association, which hosted Young at the Butlerville field day, exists to help that work grow safely across the state. The aircraft doing the work are the platforms federal policy is now squeezing.

The FCC added all foreign-made drones and components to its Covered List on December 22, 2025, blocking new equipment authorizations for DJI and Autel. The Texas Farm Bureau and others warned the move would hit agricultural operations hardest, since existing Agras hardware still flies but replacement batteries count as covered equipment and import pathways are closing. Pentagon carve-outs for Blue UAS products and drones meeting a 65% domestic content threshold expire January 1, 2027, and neither DJI nor Autel has any route to compliance. A senator praising a “drone ecosystem” is praising one his own government’s procurement and spectrum policy is actively starving at the supply end.

Domestic Spray Drones Exist, But They Cannot Close The Gap Yet

There is an American answer, and it is worth being precise about its limits. Texas-based Hylio builds NDAA-compliant agricultural drones in Houston, with entry-level models starting around $20,000 and advanced systems reaching $85,000. That is a 3x to 5x price increase over a comparable DJI Agras, whose T50 carries an MSRP near $18,000. Hylio’s own CEO, Arthur Erickson, the manufacturer who theoretically benefits most from blocking Chinese competition, called the FCC’s blanket approach “crazy” and “unexpected” when the Covered List expanded.

The capacity math is the harder problem. Hylio is expanding to a 40,000-square-foot facility near Houston, targeting 5,000 units a year by 2028, up from an estimated 500 to 1,000 today. Even at full build-out, that covers a fraction of current DJI market share, and domestic builders still source motors, batteries, and flight controllers from a global supply chain that the Covered List also touches. A Hoosier operator who wants to fly American today can, at a premium, in limited volume, with a longer wait. That is a real option, not a drop-in replacement for the fleet already in the field.

Spray Operators Still Wait On The Part 108 Rule

The test site Young celebrated exists partly to generate the safety data the FAA needs to finalize Part 108, the framework that would make routine BVLOS flight legal without case-by-case waivers. Agricultural spraying is one of the operations that framework would cover, and many spray operators already fly heavy drones above the 55-pound Part 107 ceiling under separate exemptions.

That rule is late. The deadline for a final Part 108 rule was February 1, 2026, set by the same executive order Duffy cited, and that date came and went with no final rule. The FAA reopened its comment period twice, the second time specifically over which aircraft yields when a drone and a crewed plane share low-altitude airspace. By the agency’s own count, more than half of the roughly 3,100 substantive comments addressed that right-of-way question alone. Test sites generate the evidence, but they do not resolve the policy fight holding the rule back.

DroneXL’s Take

I have covered every step of the Part 108 rulemaking since the FAA published the proposal in August 2025, and I have tracked the FCC Covered List since the agency swept in all foreign-made drones on December 22, 2025. Put those two threads next to a photo of a senator watching spray drones lift off at a Hoosier field day, and the tension on that Butlerville tarmac is hard to miss.

The test site is a genuine win for Indiana, and Young earned the right to take credit for delivering it. The harder part is the supply gap underneath the messaging. With DJI at roughly 80% of US spray drone sales and the nearest domestic option running 3x to 5x the price at a fraction of the volume, telling Hoosier farmers the country will lead this technology while choking off the machines that currently do the job is a message that works at a podium and strains in a field. Hylio and a handful of others are building the American answer, but the honest version of the story is that the answer is not ready at the scale or price the 2027 cutoff assumes.

Two things are worth watching. The first is whether the FAA keeps or walks back the presumptive right-of-way language in the Part 108 docket through summer 2026; if it narrows that provision, the timeline for the rule that governs commercial and agricultural BVLOS stretches further. The second is the January 1, 2027 expiration of the Blue UAS and domestic-content carve-outs. Young did not address, and was not asked, what a Hoosier spray operator is supposed to fly when an aging Agras fleet ages out and the domestic pipeline is still ramping. That answer matters more to the farmers at Butlerville than any test site ribbon-cutting, and right now no one in the federal government has given it.

Sources: AgriNews, Federal Aviation Administration, Indiana Capital Chronicle.

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