Yorkshire Ag DronesCertified ag-drone pilots

Published 8 April 2026 · Yorkshire Ag Drones

FETF 2026 drone grant: what's covered, what's not, and the maths before you buy

FETF 2026 Round 1 is open now and closes at midday on 28 April 2026. The Productivity theme includes a £14,476 grant towards a farm drone under item code FETF405. It sounds like a good deal — and for some farms it is. But the grant doesn't cover training, insurance or the CAA permissions you need to fly legally, and it explicitly excludes drones for pesticide spraying. For most arable farms under 600 hectares, hiring a certified contractor still comes out cheaper.

This is the honest guide. We've pulled the numbers from gov.uk, the training costs from the providers themselves, and the contractor rates from real UK jobs. We are an independent introducer — we don't sell drones and we don't run training courses. We have no commercial relationship with the retailers linked below; they're just the UK companies that actually stock the kit.

20 days to apply. FETF 2026 Round 1 closes midday Tuesday 28 April 2026. Apply through the Farming Investment Fund service on gov.uk. Scoring is competitive — not first come first served — but leaving it to the last day is still a bad idea.

What FETF 2026 actually is

The Farming Equipment and Technology Fund is a Defra grant scheme run directly by the Rural Payments Agency as part of the Farming Investment Fund. It gives farmers a fixed contribution towards specific pieces of equipment from a published items list. The 2026 round has a £50 million pot split across three themes: Productivity (£20m), Slurry (£10m) and Animal Health and Welfare (£20m). Drones sit in the Productivity theme.

The key numbers for 2026:

It's a scoring-based competitive round. You apply online, each theme is scored against the others, successful applicants get a Grant Funding Agreement, and you buy the item and claim retrospectively with invoices.

FETF405 — the drone line item

Drones sit under item code FETF405 in the Productivity items list. The exact wording on gov.uk is: "Drone for applying agricultural and horticultural products that are authorised for application by drone." That last clause is load-bearing. We'll come back to it.

The grant: £14,476 per drone. Fixed. That's what Defra has decided the public contribution is — not a percentage you work out from the invoice.

Minimum specification (all must be met):

Both of the machines UK operators actually fly — the XAG P100 Pro and the DJI Agras T40 — comfortably clear this bar. The spec is clearly written around these two classes of aircraft.

What's included alongside the drone: the liquid tank and granular hopper, a maximum of two battery packs, and one charger. That's it.

What's NOT included:

You also have to hold and evidence a GVC qualification and a CAA Operational Authorisation at the point of claim. So if you apply now, you're not just buying a drone — you're also committing to getting qualified to fly it before you can claim the money back.

The exclusion that catches everyone out

Read the FETF405 wording again: "products that are authorised for application by drone."

In the UK in 2026, there is no on-label authorisation for drone application of plant protection products — no herbicides, no fungicides, no insecticides. The only approvals that exist are for ferric phosphate slug pellets (via AutoSpray Systems Ltd's specific CAA acceptance) and for non-regulated substances like seed, granular fertiliser, biostimulants, biological controls and pod sealant polymers.

What that means in practice: FETF405 will not fund a drone you intend to use as a sprayer replacement. If you're thinking "brilliant, I can use the grant to buy an Agras and cut my herbicide passes", the grant is the wrong tool. You can still buy the drone, but not with FETF money, and you still can't legally spray herbicide from it anyway.

What FETF405 does sensibly fund is a drone for:

All the services we connect Yorkshire farmers with, in other words. None of which need a sprayer pass.

The full bill, honestly

Here's what buying a drone actually costs in 2026 — not the sticker price, the real end-to-end number. We've used directional UK figures because neither XAG (sold exclusively through AutoSpray Systems) nor the Agras dealers publish list prices. The only honest answer is "request a quote" — but these numbers are in the right ballpark for working out whether the grant is worth chasing.

ItemApprox. cost
XAG P100 Pro or DJI Agras T40 (drone + spray boom + granular hopper + 2 batteries + 1 charger)£22,000–£28,000
3–4 additional battery pairs (realistic for a day's work)£3,000–£6,000
Generator and fast-charge rig£1,500–£3,000
Tender station, IBC, PPE, transport box£2,000–£5,000
GVC course + Harper Adams Agricultural Drone Spraying & Spreading (4-day CAA-approved)£3,800–£4,500
CAA Operational Authorisation application fee~£500
Aviation third-party insurance (year 1)£1,500–£3,000
Software / RTK subscriptions (year 1)£300–£800
Gross year-one cost£34,600–£50,800
Less FETF405 grant (assuming successful application)−£14,476
Net year-one out of pocket£20,100–£36,300

Plus an annual maintenance, rotors, pumps and crash-spares burn of roughly 10–15% of the hardware value — call it another £3,000–£5,000 a year on running costs.

So the honest top-line: buying a grant-funded farm drone is a year-one outlay of around £20,000 to £36,000, plus ongoing costs of roughly £5,000 to £8,000 a year once you include insurance renewals, software and maintenance.

The break-even: when does owning beat hiring?

Here's the calculation every arable farmer should do before applying. We'll use conservative middle-of-the-road numbers.

Simple payback calculation: £25,000 year-one cost divided by a £35/ha saving per hectare of drone work gives a break-even of roughly 715 hectares of drone-eligible work a year. The realistic range across different cost and contractor-rate assumptions is 600 to 850 hectares a year, every year.

And that ignores your own time as an operator. Flying drones is skilled work, there are weather windows, it eats days — and those are days you're not in the tractor, on the phone to the agronomist, or managing the farm.

For context: a 400 hectare arable unit doing cover crop seeding on half its ground, a top-dress of granular fertiliser, and some scouting might generate 250–400 hectares of drone-eligible work a year. That's comfortably below the break-even. The contractor wins.

The farms where owning makes sense are the ones doing 600+ hectares of drone work a year themselves — which in practice means estates over 1,000 hectares, mixed farms with big cover crop and wildflower programmes, or farmers who want to be part-time contractors for their neighbours too.

Which drone should you buy?

Two machines dominate the UK ag drone market in 2026: the XAG P100 Pro and the DJI Agras T40. Both clear the FETF405 spec comfortably. Both cover around 10–15 hectares an hour in real-world conditions (the manufacturer claims of 19+ ha/hr don't survive contact with a working day). Both are genuinely workhorse machines.

For a Yorkshire farmer buying to fly for themselves, either is fine. For a farmer buying with a view to eventually flying commercial jobs for neighbours, the P100 Pro fits the UK ag ecosystem more tidily.

So — should you apply?

Yes, if:

Probably not, if:

How to apply

  1. Read the gov.uk items list first. Lock the £14,476 figure to the version of the page live on the day you apply — Defra occasionally amends. The full 2026 items and specifications list is on the gov.uk productivity items page.
  2. Confirm eligibility. You need to be a farmer, horticulturalist, forestry owner or qualifying contractor in England with a business registered on Rural Payments.
  3. Apply online through the Farming Investment Fund service on gov.uk. There's a scoring system — answer the justification questions properly.
  4. Wait. You'll be notified after the window closes whether you've been successful. Don't buy the drone before you have a Grant Funding Agreement in hand — costs incurred before the agreement are not eligible.
  5. Get qualified in parallel. Book your GVC and Harper Adams training now if you don't have them — you'll need evidence of both plus your CAA Operational Authorisation at the point of claim.
  6. Claim. Once you have the drone, the qualifications and the invoices, submit your claim through the same service.

Or — the alternative most arable farmers should probably take

If the maths above doesn't work for your farm, the alternative is the one we're built around: hire a certified pilot for the specific job, pay per hectare, keep your capital, and skip the training and regulatory overhead entirely. Yorkshire Ag Drones connects you with CAA-certified ASPN pilots flying under AutoSpray Systems Ltd's Operational Authorisation OA UAS 14429. The quote is free, there's no obligation, and we pass you directly to a pilot who covers your patch.

Get a free quote from a certified pilot

Tell us what you need and we'll match you with a certified ASPN pilot in Yorkshire. No charge for the quote. No obligation.

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Sources

This article is accurate to the best of our knowledge as of 8 April 2026. FETF guidance can change mid-round — always check the live gov.uk items list on the day you apply. Grant advice here is general information, not financial or legal advice specific to your business. Yorkshire Ag Drones is an independent introducer service connecting farmers with certified ASPN drone pilots. We do not sell drones, operate drones or run training courses, and we have no commercial relationship with any of the retailers or training providers linked above.