C-DRONE GUIDE · 10 SEPTEMBER 2026

Sunflower and drones: protecting the sowing from pigeons, counting the heads, price

In 2024, French sunflower acreage stabilised at around 820,000 hectares, led by Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Occitanie and Centre-Val de Loire, for a harvest Agreste puts at around 1.7 million tonnes. On this crop, the danger doesn't come from where you'd expect: 91% of bird damage happens at sowing and emergence — wood pigeons and crows — against just 2% at maturity. Here is what a drone brings at that precise point in the calendar, what a 2026 study documents on automated pre-harvest head counting, and what a flight does not replace.

Published on 10 September 2026, reviewed on 11 September 2026 — regulations in force as of September 2026.

A crop on the rise, from a risky sowing to a late harvest

In 2024, French sunflower acreage stabilised at around 820,000 hectares, a level 9% above the average of the previous five seasons, for a harvest Agreste puts at around 1.7 million tonnes — a figure revised downward during the season, as humid conditions at the end of harvest weighed on average yield, which fell back to around 22 to 23 quintals per hectare. Three regions account for most of the acreage: Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the leading production region with around 242,000 hectares and marked growth in 2024 (+22,000 hectares, or +9.9%), Occitanie with around 221,000 hectares, and Centre-Val de Loire, more modest at around 122,000 hectares but also growing (+5,000 hectares).

Unlike a winter crop, sunflowers expose their plot to two moments of vulnerability that sit far apart on the calendar and are completely different in nature: the freshly sown seed and young seedling, between April and May, and the head approaching maturity, between August and September. The first risk is neither a disease nor a lack of water: it is birds. That is where a drone delivers the most immediate service on this crop — before stepping in differently, later in the season, on health monitoring and yield estimation.

The real risk isn't harvest: wood pigeons and crows at sowing

One statistic shapes the whole approach to protecting sunflowers: according to field data compiled by Terres Inovia, 91% of bird damage on this crop occurs during the sowing-to-emergence phase, against just 2% at maturity. Pigeons — overwhelmingly the wood pigeon — cause 74% of that damage, with crows and other corvids coming second: a corvid digs up the seed before it even emerges, sometimes pulling out the young shoot, while a pigeon waits for emergence to eat the cotyledons or snip the young stem. Nationally, more than a third of sunflower plots are thought to be affected every year.

Facing that risk, 72% of declared plots get some form of protection, mostly bird-scaring devices — gas cannons, balloons, raptor silhouettes — whose well-documented weakness is habituation: a fixed device, set up too early or never moved, loses its effect within days. An irregular drone pass over the plot, timed to when birds tend to land — early morning and late in the day — combines the advantage of a mobile threat, harder to ignore than a fixed cannon, with that of only tying up a pilot during the genuinely sensitive window, the ten to fifteen days after sowing, rather than the whole season. This service is clearly distinct from our guide to drone bird deterrence for vineyards and orchards: that one protects ripe fruit from starlings and thrushes late in the season; this one protects a freshly sown seed from wood pigeons and crows — a completely different calendar, species and behaviour.

Once the risk window has passed, the question becomes: how many plants did the plot actually lose? A high-resolution RGB emergence count gives the real plant-by-plant density rather than a visual estimate from the field edge — the method is the same one detailed in our guide to drone-based emergence counting, originally built for maize and sugar beet, and just as applicable to sunflowers for deciding on a partial rather than a full resowing.

What the research documents: disease and head counting

Sunflowers share two feared fungal pathogens with oilseed rape: Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, which causes rot of the crown, stem and head, and Phomopsis stem canker (Diaporthe helianthi), which can lead to stem breakage and lodging before harvest. As far as we know, no published study looks at drone-based detection of these diseases directly on sunflowers; a study by Cao, Liu, Guo, Kong, Zhang and He, published in 2018 in the journal Sensors, did however develop a method for early detection of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum on oilseed rape leaves — a crop affected by the same pathogen — by fusing thermal, multispectral and RGB images captured from a drone: image fusion improved classification accuracy by 11.3 points over thermal imagery alone, with an SVM model reaching 90% accuracy in classifying disease severity (see the study on Google Scholar). The study looks at oilseed rape, not sunflowers: we flag it as an extrapolation based on a pathogen common to both crops, to be confirmed plot by plot before basing any treatment decision on it.

The second use, this time documented directly on sunflowers, concerns end-of-season head counting. A study by Iamchuen, Hongpradit, Puttinaovarat and Anucharn, published in 2026 in Sustainability, trained a YOLOv11 model on high-resolution drone imagery to automatically detect and count sunflower heads, with a precision of 0.84 and a recall of 0.95, aimed at pre-harvest yield estimation (see the study on Google Scholar). Unlike the oilseed-rape reference, this one looks directly at the crop in question: it confirms that automated counting from aerial imagery can approach the expected yield before the combine harvester enters the field — useful information for setting the harvest date, which depends on head browning and the targeted oil content, and for planning storage and delivery to the collection point.

Where to fly: Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Occitanie, Centre-Val de Loire

The three main production basins offer generally flat, open terrain, well suited both to low-altitude bird deterrence and to mapping flights: most standalone missions over a private plot, outside any controlled zone, fall under the open category with no prior process. The point worth checking before any campaign is local — proximity to an aerodrome, a military zone or an industrial site depending on the département — and is systematically checked on the Géoportail drone zone map. Our guides to missions in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Occitanie and Centre-Val de Loire cover each region's specific airspace picture.

On a farm that rotates sunflowers with wheat and oilseed rape, a single relationship with a drone pilot makes it easy to combine campaigns: our guide to variable-rate nitrogen mapping by drone in wheat and oilseed rape covers a complementary service to schedule on the same farms, at other points in the crop calendar.

Prices observed in 2026

Sunflower services are mostly billed by targeted intervention rather than by area alone: reacting at the right moment — in the days right after sowing for bird deterrence, just before harvest for head counting — matters more than plot size. Ranges observed in France in 2026, excl. VAT:

These amounts cover the flight and delivery of a usable result within 24 to 48 hours; they do not include complementary ground-based deterrence equipment, nor the agronomic decision to resow or set a harvest date, which remain the grower's or their cooperative technician's call. For a growers' group in the same basin, coordinating deterrence passes across several neighbouring plots meaningfully cuts the cost per farm — a logic that matches the industry's own recommendation to dilute bird pressure across a wider area. Request a quote stating the area, the planned sowing date and the goal: sowing-stage protection or pre-harvest counting.

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Put it into practice

• Drone precision agriculture: rates and cities covered from €8
• Precision agriculture in Poitiers Nouvelle-Aquitaine
• Precision agriculture in Béziers Occitanie
• Precision agriculture in Cannes Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur

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• Prune d'Agen and drones: water stress and ripeness, price
• Asparagus and drones: spotting weeds on the ridge before emergence, price