Agras T70P
Made by DJI Agriculture
Photo: DJI Agriculture
- rotors
- 4
- model code
- AG811
- spray tank l
- 70
- spray width m
- 4-11
- spread tank l
- 100
- max payload kg
- 70
- charge time min
- 7-9
- rtk accuracy cm
- 10
- obstacle sensing
- Front and rear millimeter-wave radar plus Tri-Vision, 60 m detection range; no LiDAR
- max speed m per s
- 20
- lifting capacity kg
- 65
- max flight time min
- 7
- max takeoff weight kg
- 126
- max flow rate l per min
- 40
- spread discharge kg per min
- 400
Who's exposed
Jobs in the threat radius
- knapsack sprayer operator
- manual pesticide applicator
- tractor sprayer operator
- agricultural aircraft pilot (crop duster)
- contract spray crew laborer
- seasonal field hand
Deployment status
DJI says more than 600,000 of its agricultural drones were deployed worldwide by the end of 2025, flown by more than 600,000 trained operators across 100+ countries and 300+ crop types, supported by 3,500 service centers — up roughly 50% from about 400,000 drones a year earlier. For China, a white paper DJI co-published with Farmers' Daily puts 2024 crop-protection flight volume above 2.6 billion mu-times (roughly 173 million hectares) and employment in crop-protection flight services at about 500,000 people, including more than 12,000 women. All of those are manufacturer or manufacturer-affiliated figures and are not independently audited. The US tells the opposite story: DJI holds an estimated 70-80% of US agricultural spray drones, but new US spray-drone sales fell 59% in 2025, from about 8,950 units in 2024 to 3,711, as Customs and Border Protection detained DJI shipments — even while US acreage treated by drone grew 58.7% to 16.4 million acres. Neither the T70P nor the T100 appears on the list of previously authorized DJI models (T30, T40, T50, T60X) that remain legal to operate in the US.
When this hits the labor market
This one is not a forecast. In China, Southeast Asia and Brazil the substitution has already happened. Field reporting from Shandong puts the arithmetic at roughly 140 person-hours replaced by about 2.5 machine-hours plus one operator — near 50 to 1. Where the timeline still matters is regulation, not capability. The EU's Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive still bans aerial spraying in principle; the Council only adopted its negotiating position on easing drone application on 27 May 2026, it is not yet law, and member states would get 30 months to implement. The US imposes a double gate: Part 107 plus a Part 137 agricultural aircraft operator certificate plus a Section 44807 approval for anything over 55 lb, and on top of that a December 2025 bar on new foreign-drone equipment authorizations. For a spray applicator in Iowa or Bavaria, what decides the next two to four years is statute, not the machine.
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The agricultural robot that has already done the replacing
Most machines in this catalog are in pilot, first-delivery, or production-ramp. The T70P is not. DJI puts its global agricultural drone fleet above 600,000 aircraft, and China alone logged more than 2.6 billion mu-times of crop-protection flying in a single year. Ranked by how much human work it has actually displaced, this quadcopter sits an order of magnitude ahead of every humanoid in this catalog combined.
The T70P — DJI model code AG811 — debuted in China in November 2024, launched globally on 15 July 2025 into Southeast Asia and Latin America first, and went on sale through authorized dealers in Europe, Central Asia and Africa from November 2025. It is not a pre-order. It is stock on a dealer’s floor.
What it does
A 70-liter spray tank, a 100-liter spreader, 70 kg of payload, and a 126 kg maximum takeoff weight on four 62-inch props. Flow runs 30 L/min on two nozzles or 40 L/min on four, with an effective spray width of 4 to 11 meters; the spreader throws compound fertilizer at up to 400 kg/min. It will also lift 65 kg on a 10-meter line. Sensing is millimeter-wave radar front and rear plus a three-camera Tri-Vision system out to 60 meters — no LiDAR, which is what you pay extra for on the larger T100. D-RTK 3 AG holds position to ±10 cm.
Two numbers belong side by side. Maximum flight time at full takeoff weight is seven minutes. The C12000 charger draws 12 kW and needs a three-phase generator of 15 kW or more to feed it. So the real unit of work is not a drone; it is a pickup truck, a diesel generator, a pair of batteries in rotation, and one operator standing in the field. DJI’s manual requires visual line of sight throughout, and DJI publishes no “one operator, N aircraft” figure. Anyone selling you an unattended-swarm story is ahead of the documentation.
On the price you will find first
DJI does not publish one. The RMB 36,999 quoted at the Chinese debut was the T70-series entry package, not this model. An Indonesian firm describing itself as an authorized sub-dealer lists IDR 245,060,000 before shipping and tax. Two US web listings show $39,199.99 and $53,999 — 38% apart, one with a struck-through $89,999, the other sold out. Since 22 December 2025 the FCC has placed all foreign-manufactured drones on its Covered List, meaning new models cannot obtain equipment authorization and therefore cannot lawfully be imported or marketed in the US; DJI is litigating that in the Ninth Circuit. Those US listings are not a reliable price and are not evidence of lawful US availability. We have left the price field empty on purpose.
Who gets replaced, and where they go
Shandong’s Haibao News ran first-hand reporting in April 2026 with a rare set of checkable numbers. Peak-season contract spraying goes for 10 to 12 yuan per mu. One operator took eight jobs across a three-month spring season, covered about 4,000 mu, and cleared roughly 40,000 yuan. In ordinary wind he could do more than 1,000 mu — about 67 hectares — in an eight-hour day. The comparison in the same piece: 400 mu takes two to three hours by drone; by hand it would take ten workers fourteen straight hours.
That is the entire labor economics of this machine. It did not abolish spraying. It replaced ten people carrying backpack sprayers with one person holding a controller, and it pays that one person considerably better than any of the ten. China’s roughly 500,000 crop-protection flight service workers are themselves a job category that did not exist fifteen years ago.
The American mirror image is instructive. As of early 2025 only about 1,000 pilots in the entire United States held authorization for agricultural drone operations, 85% of them approved in the preceding twelve months, with hundreds more applications stalled at the FAA. In the US, the brake on this substitution is paperwork and import policy — not the machine.
Why we care for LostJobs
If you want one clean, finished case of AI-adjacent automation actually taking work away from people, skip the humanoid demo reels and look here. It has everything: a product on sale, a fleet in the hundreds of thousands, a substitution ratio near 50 to 1, a named displaced occupation (the person with the backpack sprayer), a named replacement occupation (the licensed flight-service operator), and higher pay in the new one.
The second-order read matters more. The winner of this substitution is not the worker who lost the job. A seasonal field hand does not become a licensed drone operator by default — that takes a certificate, a five-figure machine, and a book of customers. China’s flight-service workforce numbers in the hundreds of thousands; the seasonal labor it displaced was an order of magnitude larger. The difference did not vanish. It dispersed back into other low-wage work.
The third-order read is political, and it cuts against the obvious framing. When US lawmakers moved to restrict DJI, the phrase they reached for was “this will be a job killer in rural America.” Note the direction. In the US the thing accused of destroying jobs is the ban, not the robot — because without cheap spray drones, operating costs rise, treated acreage stalls, and contract crews stop getting hired. The same aircraft is a displacer in Hubei and a lifeline in Nebraska. Career intelligence rarely offers a counterexample this tidy.