Drone or tractor: which is cheaper per hectare

By Nikola Mojsa, MSc in Agricultural Engineering

What tractor spraying really costs

Contract tractor spraying (in Banat) is most often charged at about RSD 2,000 per cadastral jutro (the price depends, of course, on the treatment and how demanding the field is). A cadastral jutro is 0.5755 ha, so that works out at about RSD 3,500, or roughly €30 per hectare.

If you spray with your own machinery, you pay no contractor, but the real calculation has five tangible items:

• Fuel: for the pass across the field and for hauling water back and forth.
• Water: a standard tractor sprayer uses 150 to 400 litres of water per hectare. On 30 ha that means bringing large water tankers to the field several times.
• Time: your time (or your worker's day rate) spent on spraying, driving and filling with water.
• Depreciation: normal wear on the tractor and the sprayer.
• Trampling: once the rows close and the crop grows tall, the tractor physically runs over 5 to 6% of the plants.

Only you can work out the first four items. The loss from trampling can be calculated quite precisely from the expected yield and the commodity exchange price (an example follows below).

We don't compare the product itself here, because the same amount of active ingredient per hectare goes on from a tractor and from a drone; only the volume of water used to dilute it changes.

What drone spraying costs

We charge €25 per hectare for fields up to 20 ha, €22 for 20 to 100 ha and €20 above 100 ha. The price band is set by the total area of the order. Note that the same price applies to crop protection, foliar feeding and desiccation. You supply the chemicals and the water, and travel to fields within 50 km of Opovo is free.

On field crops the drone uses 15 to 20 litres of water per hectare. Orchards, vineyards and vegetables need more liquid, and so more flights and refills, which is why they carry a €10 per hectare surcharge. For sites more than 50 km from Opovo, travel is charged at €1 for every kilometre over the limit (one way). New clients get the first hectare free on their first job (of at least 10 ha). All payment rules and worked examples are in drone spraying cost per hectare.

Drone or tractor spraying: the full calculation for 30 ha of maize

Take a real case from the field: you have 30 ha of maize in one block, 40 km from Opovo, at the end of June. The maize is well past a metre tall, the rows have fully closed, and the advisory services have just reported the flight of the European corn borer. A decision is needed, and this is your first job with us.

Against a contract tractor: the drone is about €260 cheaper in cash from the start, before we even count the damage the tractor does by trampling your maize.

Against your own tractor: you pay no cash for a spraying service, but on 30 ha you have permanently lost the yield of 1.5 to 1.8 ha of maize. You can easily find the break-even point, where the damage exceeds the cost of drone spraying: divide the drone price (€22) by the trampling rate (5%). The result is €440. If one hectare of your maize earns more than €440, the trampling alone costs you more than our entire drone spraying service. Add your time and diesel on top.

The second critical factor in corn borer control is timing. The product has to land before the caterpillar bores into the stalk, so this treatment cannot wait.

When a tractor is still the better choice

A tractor clearly keeps the lead for spraying on bare soil (soil-applied herbicides) and for herbicide treatments at early stages of emergence: the product has to land close to the weeds under high water pressure, and a tractor sprayer with lowered booms does that best. At these stages the crop is small, so there is no trampling.

We apply herbicide by drone only in extreme conditions: when rain has kept the tractor out of the field for weeks, the weeds are growing unchecked, and the crop next to your field tolerates any drift of the product. All the timings in maize are here: spraying maize after sowing and before emergence.

The rule is also clear: if the product label rules out application in low water volumes, always follow the label.

For a side-by-side list of technical specifications, see drone or tractor spraying.

When the drone takes the lead

If you don't own a sprayer, the drone is €5 to €10 per hectare cheaper than a hired tractor from the start.

• Trampling. Once maize or sunflower passes 1.5 metres in height, a tractor inevitably breaks plants. The drone solves this by flying 3 metres above the crop tops and driving the product down into the field with a strong downdraught. This applies to every summer treatment: corn borer control, the flowering fungicide and desiccation.
• Waterlogged ground. While a tractor can wait up to 5 days to get into the field after heavy rain, we spray by drone the same day, as long as we can reach the edge of your field on a firm road.
• Short application windows. Treatments such as the one against Fusarium head blight in wheat have a window of just a few days. The drone's speed means a large field is finished within the optimal window.
• Effectiveness in closed rows. A European field trial confirms this: in Romania in 2024, two fungicide treatments of sunflower by drone, at 10 litres of water per hectare, reached 94% efficacy. By comparison, a single treatment at 200 L/ha of water, the volume a tractor sprayer uses (in the trial it was also applied by drone), reached only 58%. The second treatment was done on 7 August, when a tractor can no longer enter closed rows (Șerban et al., Drones, 2026).

What we spray and on what programme is set out in drone spraying maize, and how the work at the field runs in practice is in drone spraying.