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C-DRONE GUIDE · 31 AUGUST 2026

Spraying by Drone After a Flood: The Emergency Derogation for Vineyards and Orchards

On 24 March 2026, a prefectural order did what French law bans by default since 2009: authorise, from the air, the application of plant protection products on vineyards and fruit orchards. Not under the steep-slope experiment that dominates the debate over drone spraying — a completely different mechanism, triggered as an emergency in Aude, Gard, Hérault and Pyrénées-Orientales after exceptional rainfall made any machine pass impossible without getting stuck, while downy mildew kept advancing regardless. A second order, on 9 May 2026, renewed the scheme over a narrower area. Here is how this little-known emergency derogation works, how it differs from the steep-slope regime covered elsewhere on this site, its precise technical conditions, and what it costs.

Published on 31 August 2026, reviewed on 1 September 2026 — regulations in force as of September 2026.

Two regimes, one same principle: aerial spraying remains banned

Article L. 253-8 of the French rural and maritime fishing code sets the rule: aerial spraying of plant protection products is banned in France, drones included, under the 2009 EU directive on the sustainable use of pesticides. Our guide to agricultural drone spraying and spreading covers the durable opening created by law n° 2025-365 of 23 April 2025: on steep-slope plots, banana plantations and certain rootstock mother vineyards, a drone may treat with biocontrol, organic or low-risk products, within a scheme declared in advance. That regime — the one most hillside winegrowers have in mind — is not the only one.

The same order of 15 September 2014 governing aerial spreading conditions provides, in its article 19, a second door: an emergency derogation, opened "in the case of a duly justified emergency, of an unforeseeable or exceptional nature, in particular climatic," or when a harmful organism cannot be controlled by any means other than aerial spreading. The party commissioning the work — often a chamber of agriculture or a farming union, sometimes a single farmer — files a request with the département's prefect, together with a prior treatment declaration. If granted, the order is posted in the town halls of the communes concerned and published in the official register of administrative acts; a register of requests and derogations remains available for inspection at the prefecture for two years.

This mechanism is nothing new: as early as June 2022, an order had already temporarily authorised aerial spraying on certain vineyards in Côte-d'Or. What changed in 2026 is the scale and visibility of its use: four départements, two successive orders, genuine agricultural news rather than an isolated case.

March-May 2026 in Occitanie: anatomy of a derogation

By late March 2026, Aude, Gard, Hérault and Pyrénées-Orientales were emerging from weeks of exceptional rainfall. Vineyard and orchard plots were waterlogged: any pass of a tractor or trailed sprayer risked getting stuck and, worse, causing lasting soil compaction that would penalise vines for years. The problem is that downy mildew and other fungal diseases do not wait for soil to drain — stagnant moisture is precisely their best ally. The prefect granted the derogation through an order of 24 March 2026, published in the Official Journal on 26 March and taking effect the next day: application by uncrewed aircraft authorised until 30 April 2026, on vineyard and fruit orchard plots only, made inaccessible or impracticable by land due to flooding.

The order tightly frames the operation. Only one product is authorised, listed in an annex: Bordeaux mixture RSR DISPERSS (marketing authorisation no. 9500452), a classic copper-based fungicide. Flight conditions are quantified: flight height capped at 3 metres above the vegetation, speed no more than 18 km/h, take-off mass no more than 200 kg, the aircraft fitted with drift-reduction accessories reflecting the best available techniques. A 50-metre safety distance must be kept from dwellings, places open to the public, gardens and water points. Each farmer must file a prior declaration at least 48 hours before the job — and may only use it after showing no ground-based means is available, a subsidiarity condition found in every order of this kind.

The scheme is not fixed: a second order of 9 May 2026 renewed a derogation, but over a narrower area — vines only, in Bouches-du-Rhône, Gard and Hérault, orchards excluded this time. Each order is a one-off decision, reassessed département by département and season by season: as of today there is no general decree that pre-secures drone spraying in the event of flooding. An affected farmer therefore needs to follow bulletins from their DRAAF or chamber of agriculture rather than assume a precedent guarantees a standing authorisation.

Why a drone rather than an aircraft — what the research shows

Crewed aerial spraying by plane or helicopter, which long treated hillside vineyards, has all but vanished from the French regulatory landscape: uncontrollable drift over wide swaths, noise nuisance, the cost of mobilising a crewed aircraft for a handful of hectares. The drone changes the equation because it flies low, slow and close to the target — exactly the parameters the order of 24 March 2026 hard-codes (3 m, 18 km/h). A study by A. Biglia and co-authors, published in 2022 in Science of the Total Environment, compared different flight modes and onboard sprayer settings on a drone in a vineyard: switching to a row-localised band pass rather than broadcast spraying multiplied canopy deposit by four while cutting ground losses by 54%, compared with a uniform broadcast pass (see the study on Google Scholar). That is precisely the gesture an emergency job demands: treating the affected vine row without wasting product over the flooded inter-row.

A second study, led by V. Psiroukis and co-authors and published in 2025-2026, directly compared the drift of a spraying drone against that of a conventional pneumatic sprayer under real vineyard conditions: under optimised settings, the drone cut drift by 65 to 70% at the closest measurement point, with the gap widening further beyond ten metres (see the study on Google Scholar). On plots bordered by dwellings or water points — exactly what the order's 50-m safety distance targets — that gap directly determines whether the job is feasible at all.

Even so, a spreading drone is no toy: at 200 kg take-off weight, it falls under the specific category and requires a prior DSAC operating authorisation, independent of the plant-health derogation — one governs the product and its agricultural use, the other governs the flight itself. Our guide to BVLOS, STS and SORA covers this second layer, required even for a few days' emergency job.

If your plot is affected: procedure and price

An emergency derogation is not triggered at the request of a single isolated farmer: in the March and May 2026 cases, it was the chambers of agriculture of Aude, Gard, Hérault and Pyrénées-Orientales that carried the collective request to the prefectures, based on a shared assessment of the disease pressure and the impracticability of the soil. A winegrower or orchardist facing a similar situation should therefore alert their chamber of agriculture or farming union at the first signs — waterlogged soil, rising mildew pressure — rather than wait for an order that will only come once the collective process is under way. Bulletins from the relevant regional DRAAF and the agriculture ministry's "phytosanitary regulatory news" pages publish these orders as they are issued.

Once the derogation is published, execution almost always falls to a specialised provider already holding the DSAC authorisation for a spreading drone: few farms own a machine in that category outright, and the implementation window — often just a few weeks — leaves no time to acquire one. Rates observed on emergency jobs of this kind run between €200 and €400/ha excl. VAT, a higher range than non-emergency experimental steep-slope spraying (€150 to €300/ha) — rapid mobilisation over a narrow, time-limited area weighs more than the area treated. On an emergency job, a provider's responsiveness usually matters more than the per-hectare rate: the window between the order and its deadline is measured in weeks, not months. Our agricultural drone page presents our full range of services; for a request tied to an emergency derogation, request a quote stating the prefectural order's reference, the crop and the area concerned.

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