21/08/2026
Agdrones will lift safety. Farming is a dangerous industry and Farmers are very skilled at managing risk.
On Thursday it was announced that routine agricultural drone operations will move from Part 102 certification to a notification to CAA. This is going to lift safety on farms.
The work a drone takes is the worst work on the farm
Drones are ideal for the steep faces, the wet gullies, the scrub and the gorse, the sidling tracks where a bike with a full tank on the back is a bad idea and everyone knows it.
It also happens to be exactly where people get killed. Quad bike deaths in this country are overwhelmingly rollovers, on slopes, usually with a load on. On average five people a year die in work related quad bike incidents. More than 100 suffer severe injuries.
ACC accepted more than 17,000 work related agricultural claims last year and paid out $119 million helping people recover.
There are more than 80,000 quad bikes working on New Zealand farms. Every hectare that moves off one and onto a drone takes a person off a hillside.
At the current fleet size the effect is real. Our estimate is that agricultural drones have already prevented somewhere around 30 ACC injury claims and a handful of serious injuries.
On credible adoption over the six years after this rule takes effect, the same modelling puts the number in the hundreds of injury claims and dozens of serious injuries prevented. Somewhere in there are people who would otherwise have been killed.
We are not going to pretend that is a precise number. The direction is not in doubt though. Take the most dangerous job on the farm and give it to a machine with nobody sitting on it, and fewer people get hurt.
