Harper Adams partners with one of world's largest drone companies

XAG's technology will help UK farmers by improving farm productivity
XAG's technology will help UK farmers by improving farm productivity

A new partnership will see one of the world’s largest drone and robot companies team up with Harper Adams University.

The National Centre for Precision Farming (NCPF) at Harper Adams University and XAG, a Chinese company which was founded in 2007, have recently formed a strategic academic and research partnership.

XAG focuses on agricultural automation and research and development of unmanned devices.

It is one of the world’s largest agricultural drone manufactures with a large-scale manufacturing and operational centre in China.

Over a period of 12 months, XAG crop-spraying drones have flown 1.7 million times in total, served more than 700,000 Chinese farmers covering two million hectares of land.

Justin Gong, Co-Founder and Vice President of XAG said: “As the strategic partnership has been officially established, I am sincerely looking forward to the collaborations between XAG and Harper Adams University to develop localised done and robotic solutions which suit the UK and European farmers.”

Mr Gong said XAG's technology can serve UK farmers, to help them improve productivity using sensors mounted on the drones to monitor the condition of the crop and subsequently only applying the chemical precisely on area requiring treatment.

“In addition, we would like to devote more on researching about AI technologies and ground-based robots to free farmers’ hands, also to accelerate the popularisation of drone application,” Mr Gong added.

At present, UK legislation does not permit the use of drones for crop spraying.

However, Harper Adams is working closely with the relevant authorities, such as CAA and others to enable trials involving drones for the first time in the country.