Over three million acres of American farmland were sprayed by drones last year alone! As more farmers use drones for spraying and scouting, there are concerns that drones made in China pose a major risk to our national security.
“A country like China—which is in economic competition with us now, and perhaps even more serious, competition in the future—it’d be foolish to think that they wouldn’t try to use every advantage that they have to get an edge economically,” says Arthur Erickson, CEO of Hylio, which is a drone manufacturer based in Texas.
He says the main concern has been over the use of drones that come from a Chinese company called DJI.
“Back in 2017, the Department of Homeland Security put out a memo stating that they had strong reasons to believe that DJI drones were sending critical information back to the Chinese government that could be used to undermine U.S. National Security,” he says. “Then you start to see in The National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 that the Chinese-made drones were in fact banned for purchasing use by the U.S. government. Now that ban and those concerns have grown even further and there are calls to ban Chinese drone use outright—not just in the private sector, but in the public sector as well in the United States.”
Erickson says there’s legislation that has passed in the U.S. House that would effectively ban the use of drones made by DJI.
“What [the legislation] will do is basically make DJI into a ‘covered entity’ as defined by the government, which means that they would not be allowed to have FCC authorization to operate on the frequencies and communication channels in our country, so all of their drones would basically become paperweights because they need those frequencies to function,” according to Erickson.
The Countering CCP Drones Act passed through the House back in June as part of The National Defense Authorization Act for 2025 (NDAA). However, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) has recently released its marked-up version of the 2025 NDAA, and it does not include the provisions to effectively ban DJI activities that were present in the House version. If it passes the full Senate, the legislation must then be reconciled with the House version, which may or may not ultimately include the DJI drone ban.
According to USDA, China is known to own nearly 350,000 acres of farmland across 27 states. However, the Chinese government and those who have Chinese citizenship are banned from owning farmland anywhere in Indiana—or any real estate located within a ten-mile radius of a U.S. military installation. That same law also includes Russia, Iran, and North Korea, which took effect on July 1, 2024.
