With XAG drones, site-specific spot treatment is no longer just a concept. In this post, we showcase how this innovative method becomes applicable on Hungarian soils as well. The industry is currently experiencing explosive growth, and properly interpreting these developments is essential to enable their broad adoption in agriculture.
Site-Specific Spot Treatment with Drones
In agriculture, precision technology is gaining increasing importance, offering not only greater cost efficiency and time savings but also more environmentally friendly solutions. By 2025, the potential of drones to deliver highly targeted treatments—whether pesticides, fertilizers, granules, oil-based products, suspensions, or water-soluble powders—is already well-known to most farmers.
Due to mild winters, pests and pathogens can appear on fields much earlier than usual, sometimes as early as February. However, this does not necessarily mean that the entire field requires treatment. Problems most often start in localized patches and spread from there. This makes it crucial to identify these infected or deficient areas in time—ideally before visible symptoms appear on the plants.
This is where drones equipped with multispectral cameras provide invaluable support. These devices capture data in various spectral bands (such as RGB and NIR), creating highly detailed images of crop conditions with a resolution of just a few square centimeters—compared to the tens or hundreds of square meters per pixel in satellite imagery. The resulting maps clearly reveal patches where plants are under stress.
It is important to emphasize, however, that while remote sensing highlights problem areas, it cannot determine the exact cause—whether it is a pest, pathogen, or nutrient deficiency. Field inspections are essential to confirm the underlying issue.
In practice, this approach is made possible with software such as Pix4DFields, working in combination with XAG’s precision agriculture drones (e.g., the XAG P100 or P100 Pro). Within the software, the farmer can designate no-spray zones, mark obstacles, and outline treatment patches. The system can also recognize similar patterns on the map, making the process of marking even faster.
The designated areas can then be exported as KML or SHP files and uploaded into the XAG Field Management System. Once loaded, the drone will spray only the identified problem patches, avoiding unnecessary pesticide or nutrient application.
The result: a more cost-effective, efficient, and environmentally sustainable crop protection strategy, where farmers save time and resources while improving yield security.
