C-DRONE GUIDE · 13 SEPTEMBER 2026

Hail netting in orchards: drone integrity checks, what research shows, price

A single-row or flat-roof hail net represents an investment of several tens of thousands of euros per hectare — a piece of equipment almost as costly as the orchard it protects, where a single tear or a loosened anchor point can expose an entire harvest to the next hailstorm. After a spell of strong wind, coming out of winter, or simply as a routine check ahead of the risk season, checking several hectares of netting on foot takes a full day; a drone flight covers the same area in a matter of minutes and documents, with images to back it up, the structure's exact condition. Here is what such a flight actually checks, what scientific research shows — and does not yet show — about the interaction between drones and hail nets, and prices observed in 2026.

Published on 13 September 2026, reviewed on 14 September 2026 — regulations in force as of September 2026.

Hail netting: an investment that needs checking fast

The cost of setting up a fully equipped apple orchard — trees, hail netting, irrigation and frost protection, trellising — jumped from €46,339 to €75,139 per hectare between 2018 and 2023, a 62% rise, according to planting-cost surveys published by trade magazine Réussir Fruits & Légumes. The netting alone, installed on an already-planted orchard, is quoted by the trade press at between €5,000 and €20,000 per hectare depending on the structure chosen, for 80 to over 200 hours of labour per hectare to install. A support structure is depreciated over roughly twenty years, but the net fabric itself — the part that tears, sags or bleaches in the sun — has a service life of only 5 to 7 years according to CTIFL, which calls for regular checks well before the net's theoretical end of life.

That level of investment reflects the scale of the risk it covers. In Indre-et-Loire, the CODAR commission recognised in December 2024 losses on apples and pears across 66 municipalities after a hail and wind storm on 17-21 June 2024: one pear grower saw yield fall from 25 to 8 tonnes per hectare, a 68% loss, compensated at 40% of the reference value above the 30% deductible threshold. The 2025 season kept the pattern going: hail events recognised in Aude in May, orchards described as "devastated" in Ardèche over the summer, damage recorded in Pyrénées-Orientales in July, a property-tax rebate announced in Lot-et-Garonne. National apple production in 2024 came in at 1.426 million tonnes, down 5% year on year, partly attributable to these spring weather events. In that context, a net that fails to protect because a tear went unnoticed in time wipes out several years of depreciation in a single storm.

What a drone flight checks on hail netting, single-row or roof-style

Not every net is checked the same way, because not every net is installed the same way. The single-row system (often sold under the Alt'Carpo name) covers each row individually with one piece of fabric fixed at the top and closed at the base — the most enclosed design, tight enough to also act as a barrier against codling moth. A CTIFL study tracking 26 plots over four years measured an average damage rate of 0.38% under this type of net, with 21 plots showing no damage at all and no extra pesticide treatment against codling moth. The single-block or flat-roof system, by contrast, covers several rows at once on a fixed support structure: a heavier investment in poles and cables, but one continuous protected area. Peripheral netting, finally, rings an already goblet-trained orchard at lower cost, at the price of less complete cover overhead.

A drone flight checks the same things in all three cases: tears, sagging sections, loosened anchors leaving a gap at ground level, and areas poorly closed back up after an intervention or pruning. On a single-row system, the drone can fly low, right within the corridor formed by each covered row — a practice documented by research, covered below. On a roof-style or single-block system, inspection is more often carried out above the structure, photographing the net's upper face and the condition of the support cables and poles, section by section — the flight itself remains subject to the same open-category rules, sub-category A1 or A3 depending on proximity to bystanders, as any other agricultural mission, as detailed in our precision agriculture by drone offer. On a multi-hectare farm, this check is best scheduled ahead of the risk season, then again after any spell of strong wind or hail liable to have damaged the structure itself.

What research shows — and does not yet show — about drones and hail netting

Flying under a net is no small matter for a drone, and that is exactly what an Italian-American team led by Francesco Betti Sorbelli studied, publishing in 2024 in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks: the authors model a net-covered orchard as an aisle graph, where the drone must fly close to the trees and take pictures at precise positions to detect pests, under battery-life constraints — and propose a route-optimisation algorithm tailored to this geometric constraint specific to netted orchards (see the study on Google Scholar). It is the best available evidence that a net is no mere backdrop for flight planning: it structures and constrains the drone's path.

A net constrains just as much what a sensor sees through it. A South African study by Towers, Strever and Poblete-Echeverría, published in 2019 in Remote Sensing, compared several vegetation indices — including NDVI — to estimate the leaf area index of vine rows covered or not by Grenbiule-brand hail netting, and shows that the net's presence measurably alters the canopy's spectral response, to the point of requiring indices to be recalibrated depending on whether netting is present (see the study on Google Scholar). A hail net is therefore neither fully opaque nor neutral for imaging: a drone does not "see through" it as though it were not there — it captures a combination of the net and the vegetation beneath, which limits how reliable a standard vigor map is for as long as the net stays up.

No study published to date deals specifically with drone inspection of a hail net's physical integrity in a French orchard — a systematic review published in 2025 in the journal Climate notes exactly this shortage of work combining remote sensing and hail netting as a still-open research avenue. The closest ground covered comes from satellite remote sensing: a Brazilian team led by Danielle Furuya published a method in Remote Sensing in 2026 for mapping netted apple orchards, combining Sentinel-2 time series with machine learning (random forest and a convolutional neural network) to tell a netted orchard apart from an open one across a whole territory. Useful for a cooperative or an insurer wanting the bigger picture, that satellite resolution (10 to 20 m per pixel) remains far too coarse to spot a single tear — exactly the resolution gap a low-altitude drone flight fills at farm scale.

What a drone never decides, and 2026 prices

The honesty clause. Choosing a net's colour is not a neutral decision for orchard health, and a drone does not make that call. A Brazilian study by Mayra Gonçalves and Amauri Bogo, published in 2012 in Crop Protection, compared 'Royal Gala' and 'Fuji' apple trees left uncovered, covered with black netting, or covered with white netting over two seasons: black netting was associated with a higher intensity of apple scab than white netting (see the study on Google Scholar). That kind of trade-off — net colour, mesh size, light transmission — is for the agronomist and the net supplier to weigh, not aerial imagery. Nor does a drone measure fruit colour or sugar content, or replace an insurance loss adjuster's visit after a claim: when the same storm has damaged both the net and the harvest, assessing the damage to the fruit is a separate service, detailed in our guide to drone assessment of agricultural damage after hail or storms — the two flights are usefully scheduled on the same day, but remain two distinct deliverables.

Orders of magnitude observed in France in 2026, excluding VAT:

These missions build on our precision agriculture by drone offer; the regulatory information on this page reflects the rules in force in September 2026. Request a quote stating the type of netting (single-row, roof-style, peripheral), the area covered, and whether the flight follows a hail or wind event.

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