C-DRONE GUIDE · 7 SEPTEMBER 2026

Drone and Adour kiwifruit: detecting Psa before symptoms, managing frost, prices

Adour kiwifruit is no minor crop: the PGI alone brings together around 350 growers across nearly 1,000 ha, in a South-West that accounts for 75% of French output. The sector has lived with Psa since July 2010, a bacterial disease that triggered a national surveillance plan and that often shows its first signs only once infection is well established. Every spring it also faces a risk few other fruit crops share to the same degree: actinidia flowers only once per season, and a bud burnt by frost yields no fruit at all on that cane. Here is what an aerial survey concretely brings to a grower or cooperative in the Adour valley.

Published on 7 September 2026, reviewed on 11 September 2026 — regulations in force as of September 2026.

A sector concentrated in the South-West, under health surveillance since 2010

France is the 3rd-largest European kiwifruit producer, with around 1,150 growers across 3,777 ha for 51,000 t harvested in 2024 (Chambres d'agriculture France, French Ministry of Agriculture). The sector's historical heartland sits in the Landes and the Adour valley, where the crop was established roughly half a century ago: the Kiwi de l'Adour PGI, carried notably by the Sikig cooperative, today brings together around 350 growers across nearly 1,000 ha, for an estimated 6,500 t produced in 2024. The South-West — Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie combined — accounts for 75% of national production on its own.

This geographic concentration carries a downside: the sector has lived with Psa (Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae), kiwi bacterial canker, since July 2010, now present in almost all French production areas. A national surveillance plan was set up as early as 2011 by state services working with the sector, complemented by surveillance organised directly by growers (French Senate, written question no. 07083 of 2013; FREDON Occitanie). For a grower in the Adour valley, this double reality — a high-value, geographically concentrated crop and a pathogen under permanent watch — changes the equation: spotting an outbreak early, before it spreads to the neighbouring orchard, weighs directly on the season's result.

Psa, a bacterium that shows symptoms only once infection has taken hold

Psa shows up as cankers on the wood, a characteristic reddish exudate and shoot wilting, but these signs most often appear once the bacterium is already well established in the tissue — hence the value of a tool that objectifies a vigour irregularity before it becomes visible to the eye at the end of a row. A study published in 2022 in the journal Plants by a Portuguese team led by Mafalda Reis-Pereira evaluated, on real orchards, a machine-learning model able to diagnose kiwi bacterial canker from the foliage's spectral signature alone: the chosen model, combining stepwise variable selection with a support-vector-machine classifier, reaches 85% overall accuracy (see the study on Google Scholar).

Transposing this to a multispectral drone survey does not match a laboratory hyperspectral sensor's spectral resolution, but the principle remains directly usable: a regular pass over the orchard, particularly at the end of winter and after a wind or hail episode — two circumstances that favour the bacterium's entry through wounds — makes it possible to locate the zones where vigour drops relative to the rest of the plot. The drone never replaces a laboratory diagnosis — only a PCR test confirms the presence of Psa — but it turns a random walk-through into a targeted sampling plan: instead of checking rows at random, the grower or a FREDON technician sends the sample to where the imagery flagged a drop, weeks ahead of a visible canker.

Canopy vigour and missing plants: what a surface model reveals

Beyond Psa, a standard photogrammetric survey delivers a surface model of the pergola: data that, on a kiwifruit orchard, reads directly as canopy height and volume per plant. A study published in 2019 in the International Journal of Agricultural and Biological Engineering by Jinya Xue and co-authors showed that a digital surface model built from drone RGB imagery can assess canopy vigour plant by plant and identify weakened or missing vines (see the study on Google Scholar). On a kiwifruit pergola, where every missing or declining plant means a direct production loss over several years — the time a young plant needs to reach an adult vine's vigour —, this plant-by-plant reading has immediate operational value: it pinpoints exactly where to replant, where to reinforce fertilisation, or where to investigate a health cause.

The same pass also serves irrigation management: kiwifruit is a water-demanding crop, and a multispectral vigour map, cross-referenced with the surface model, distinguishes a vigour drop tied to localised water stress from one tied to a disease outbreak — two diagnoses that call for different responses. Sensor choice — multispectral for vigour, high-resolution RGB for a plant count or a quick visual check — follows the same logic detailed in our guide to multispectral or RGB camera on an agricultural drone. Late in the season, a dedicated RGB pass for fruit counting naturally completes this monitoring: the method is detailed in our guide to estimating orchard yield by drone.

Spring frost: one flowering, one chance — method and 2026 prices

The risk specific to actinidia lies in its biology: unlike fruit crops able to partly compensate for a loss of flowers with a secondary fruit set, kiwifruit flowers only once per season. A bud burnt by frost yields neither leaf nor flower — so no fruit at all on that cane for the year. Damage appears from -1 to -3 °C on buds, and from -0.5 °C on young fruit already set (ephytia INRAE). In the South-West and the Adour valley, the most widespread defence remains overhead sprinkler protection on the buds: water freezing on the surface releases latent heat that keeps the bud around 0 °C, a protection that avoids damage almost all of the time according to feedback from the sector (SCAAP Kiwifruits).

A thermal drone steps in at two points of the same risk: before a frost night, a thermal map of the orchard locates the cold-air pockets — low ground, wind-sheltered areas — where to concentrate sprinkler protection or any other active defence, on the same principle detailed in our guide to spring frost in vineyards and orchards; after the frost, a thermal and multispectral pass objectifies the real extent of the damage, plot by plot, to build a substantiated crop-insurance file rather than a disputable visual estimate.

Ranges observed in France in 2026, excl. VAT:

These amounts cover the flight, image processing and map delivery; they include neither a confirmatory PCR test for Psa, nor frost-protection treatment itself. For a kiwifruit farm in the Adour valley or elsewhere in France, request a quote stating the area to cover, the wanted pass frequency through the season and whether Psa monitoring is already in place with your regional FREDON — our page on precision agriculture by drone covers the method across all crops.

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