Addressing Global Food Security through UAV-Enabled Precision Farming: A Literature Review and Market Analysis

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have transitioned from experimental platforms to core enablers of precision agriculture between 2021 and 2025, driven by advances in remote sensing, AI/ML analytics, and autonomous operations that improve input efficiency, yield stability, and environmental performance across diverse cropping systems. Industry evidence indicates rapid global scaling led by spray and scouting applications, with DJI reporting ~400,000 agricultural drones in use by end 2024 and associated cumulative environmental benefits including large water savings and substantial emissions reductions, contextualizing academic findings that demonstrate efficacy for weed detection, variable rate applications, and crop stress diagnostics. Systematic reviews and domain syntheses converge on strong performance for UAV based weed management and targeted herbicide spot spraying, while highlighting methodological needs for standardized data collection, validation, and sensor fusion practices in field deployments. Despite market growth projections and positive case studies, adoption barriers persist, including battery/endurance limits, regulatory heterogeneity, data analytics burdens, and cost and skills gaps that particularly affect smallholders and under resourced regions. This review integrates 2021–2025 research and industry reports to map technical trends, agronomic impacts, sustainability outcomes, and open challenges, and proposes a forward agenda emphasizing AI first autonomy, swarm coordination, interoperable analytics, and supportive policy and capacity building ecosystems