Large-scale drone adoption in agriculture faces several intertwined challenges. High initial costs, limited flight time, and payload capacity restrict scalability, especially for small and marginal farmers. Regulatory hurdles—such as complex airspace permissions and operator certifications—slow deployment and create compliance burdens. A lack of skilled personnel and technical know-how impedes practical usage and data interpretation. Additionally, environmental constraints like weather sensitivity and battery limitations reduce operational reliability. Together, these factors form a bottleneck that demands policy reform, capacity building, and affordable tech solutions to unlock drones’ full potential in farming.

Key challenges to large-scale drone adoption in agriculture include high upfront costs and operating costs for smallholders, limited local maintenance and pilot training ecosystems, fragmented regulatory compliance and certification burdens, concerns over data privacy and security, difficulties achieving reliable BVLOS operations in congested or restricted airspaces, and the need for validated ROI through agronomic demonstrations and value-added service models to persuade conservative farmer communities.