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Practical guides to smart farming

Plain-language guides to agricultural automation — costs, payback, regional regulation and sourcing. Written for distributors, farm operators and project buyers, not for engineers.

JT-80 spray drone treating terraced tea ground
Field notesWritten by the people who build the machines
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JT-80 agricultural spray drone on display at the JTILEP booth, CIAME 2026 Tianjin
Exhibition · CIAME 2026

JTILEP at CIAME 2026: HD818 Auto Steering and JT-80 Spray Drone

Two production units on show in Tianjin, 26–28 October: the HD818 retrofit auto-steering kit and the JT-80 spray drone with its 70 L spray tank and 100 L spreading hopper.

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Spray drone running a ground nozzle and flow-rate test
Cost breakdown · Spray drones

How Much Does an Agricultural Spray Drone Cost in 2026? A Complete Buyer's Breakdown

A commercial agricultural spray drone costs USD 15,000–40,000 as a ready-to-fly aircraft in 2026, but the machine is rarely the whole bill.

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HD818 tractor auto-steering retrofit kit: in-cab display, GNSS receiver and steering actuator
Cost breakdown · Auto-steering

Tractor Auto-Steering Cost in 2026: Retrofit vs Factory-Fit, and When It Pays Back

Retrofitting auto-steering onto a tractor you already own costs USD 2,800–3,500 for an entry-level electric-steering kit in 2026 — roughly 35% less than.

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The HD818 in-cab terminal with no job loaded, showing separate fields for vehicle type, implement type, task, field and material
Technical · GNSS corrections

RTK Without a Base Station: How Satellite Corrections Work Where CORS Doesn't Exist

Centimetre-level RTK accuracy depends on a correction source within about 30 kilometres of the machine.

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Agricultural spray drones on display in the JTILEP showroom in Xuzhou
Payback model · Spray drones

Agricultural Drone Payback: How Many Acres Before Ownership Beats Hiring

University modelling places the break-even between owning a spray drone and hiring a contractor at roughly 980 sprayed acres per year — about 400 hectares.

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Close-up of the JT-80 spray drone body showing the tank, antennas and arm mounts
Comparison · Application methods

Spray Drone vs Tractor Sprayer vs Agricultural Aircraft: Cost Per Hectare in 2026

On the clearest like-for-like benchmark available — one source, one country, one cost definition — a single agricultural drone costs more per hectare than.

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JT-80 full-size agricultural spray drone in flight over terraced ground
Equipment selection · Payload class

Full-Size Spray Drone vs Compact Spray Drone: Which Payload Class Fits Your Farm

The payload class that fits your farm is decided by two numbers that have nothing to do with the aircraft: the size of your largest single block,

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Close-up of the JT-80 spray drone body showing the tank, antennas and arm mounts
Explainer · Smart Agriculture

What Is Smart Agriculture and How Does It Work?

Smart agriculture uses IoT, drones, auto-steering and AI to make farming autonomous. Learn how the sense-analyse-execute loop works, what adoption costs and how air-ground systems deliver.

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Agricultural robot vs drone comparison
Comparison · Smart Machinery

Agricultural Robot vs Drone: Choosing the Right Automation

Drones spray from the air; robots work the ground. Compare capabilities, costs and use cases - and use a three-question framework to choose the right agricultural automation for your farm.

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Coverage

What we write about

Every guide is checked against our own product specifications before it goes live — if a number appears here, we can point to the source.

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Smart Agriculture

The wider connected-farming system: precision positioning, aerial and ground sensing, and the AI decision layer that ties them together.

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Smart Machinery

Tractor auto-steering, agricultural drones and how an air-ground system fits together in a single fleet.

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Buying & Sourcing

OEM versus own brand, MOQ and lead times, certification and export documentation for your destination market.

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Market Data

Growth rates, adoption figures and market sizing from published research — with the source named so you can verify it.

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