“We estimated the number of agricultural drones operating in some of the world’s leading agricultural countries by scouring online news and trade publications in many different languages. This effort revealed where agricultural drones have already taken off around the world.

Historically, most agricultural technology – tractors, for example – has spread from high-income countries to middle- and then lower-income ones over the course of many decades. Drones partially reversed and dramatically accelerated this pattern, diffusing first from East Asia to Southeast Asia, then to Latin America, and finally to North America and Europe. Their use in higher-income regions is more limited but is accelerating rapidly in the U.S. 

China leads the world in agricultural drone manufacturing and adoption. In 2016, a Chinese company introduced the first agriculture-specific quadcopter model. There are now more than 250,000 agricultural drones reported to be in use there. Other middle-income countries have also been enthusiastic adopters. For instance, drones were used on 30% of Thailand’s farmland in 2023, up from almost none in 2019, mainly by spraying pesticides and spreading fertilizers.

In the U.S., the number of agricultural drones registered with the Federal Aviation Administration leaped from about 1,000 in January 2024 to around 5,500 in mid-2025. Industry reports suggest those numbers substantially underreport U.S. drone use because some owners seek to avoid the complex registration process. Agricultural drones in the U.S. are used mainly for spraying crops such as corn and soy, especially in areas that are difficult to reach with tractors or crop-dusting aircraft.

In countries such as China, Thailand and Vietnam, millions of smallholder farmers have upgraded from the dangerous and tiring job of applying agrochemicals by hand with backpack sprayers to using some of the most cutting-edge technology in the world, often using the same models that are popular in the U.S.”

From The Conversation.

“Fire-resistant seeds offer promise, at a low cost, for restoring areas devastated by burning in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna, a project by biologist Giovana Cavenaghi Guimarães shows.

Guimarães, a doctoral candidate at São Paulo State University (UNESP), focused on five species of Cerrado-native seeds, including jatobá (Hymenaea courbaril), amendoim-bravo (Pterogyne nitens), mulungu (Erythrina mulungu) and canafístula (Peltophorum dubium). All are naturally adapted to extreme heat.

According to Guimarães, these plants can survive in adverse conditions such as the high temperatures caused by wildfires, which makes their seeds ideal for environmental recovery after such events. The species also have a greater germination capacity: on average, 99% of seeds develop into trees…

According to Guimarães, planting seeds of these native fire-resistant species can be a solution to recover large areas destroyed by wildfires, especially in the Cerrado, the Brazilian biome that burns the most. Data from INPE, Brazil’s national space agency, showed 46.8% of all fire outbreaks recorded in the country in the first 10 months of the year — almost 50,000 — occurred in the Cerrado.”

From Mongabay.

Summary: A family group chat about Thanksgiving dinner reflects centuries of extraordinary advancement. The same journey that once separated families by months can now be made in hours. A meal that was once a rare luxury has become highly affordable. From instant communication to abundant food, everyday conveniences serve as a reminder that human ingenuity has transformed hardship into prosperity.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, my sister sent a link to our family group chat. It wasn’t an RSVP form; it was closer to an online wedding gift registry. All the Thanksgiving classic foodstuffs were on the list—turkey, honey baked ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, candied yams, green bean casserole, pumpkin pie, and more—each with a sign-up slot to commit to bringing the goods. This brief interaction represented numerous aspects of human progress, and I paused to take it in with awe and gratitude.

For one, I live in Boston, not far from where the original Thanksgiving Pilgrims settled in Plymouth, while my family lives in Los Angeles. The distance between us is almost identical to the distance between Britain and the New World, roughly 3,000 miles across land instead of ocean. Yet, the majority of Pilgrims never returned home and never even had the opportunity to stay in contact with the world they left behind. A letter across the Atlantic would cost days’ worth of wages and take months to arrive, if it found safe passage at all.

By the time the first Americans began settling in California in the 1840s, locomotives and the telegraph had been invented, but no transcontinental systems had yet been established. Most westward settlers knew they were signing up for a one-way journey taking many months, with high rates of death and disease. If they could maintain any contact with family on the other side of the continent, messages would take weeks via stagecoach. Even the extraordinarily speedy and expensive Pony Express system—with riders galloping nonstop at full speed, exchanging horses every 10-15 miles, and exchanging riders once or twice a day—still took 10 days to deliver messages across the country.

By the time the first transcontinental telegraph line was established in 1861, messages took minutes rather than weeks but were extraordinarily expensive—nearly a day’s average wage per word. Messages had to be brief and were largely reserved for the government, the military, and the ultra-wealthy. However, a decade later, the first transcontinental railroad was established, which, with the adoption of standardized domestic postage, meant most Americans could afford to send letters across the country and have them arrive within a week. Travel between Los Angeles and Boston became possible but still took weeks and cost several weeks’ worth of average wages.

Innovation accelerated even more rapidly during the 20th century with the invention and commercialization of telephones and air travel. By 1950, the luxuries of traveling between coasts in six hours and communicating across coasts in real time became possible. But these new services were still extraordinarily expensive. Transcontinental flights, both then and now, cost around $300; however, adjusted for inflation, a $300 flight in 1950 corresponds to well over $3,000 in today’s dollars. Likewise, while modern phone plans offer unlimited texts and calls for the equivalent of a few hours of the average minimum wage per month, transcontinental phone calls in the 1950s cost over $2.00 per minute, or over $27 per minute in today’s dollars. Only in the last 30 years, thanks to the economic engine of progress, did it become affordable for the average American to call long-distance for hours.

The technologies enabling long-distance communication and travel have improved immeasurably from the time of the Pilgrims.  That alone is reason enough to be thankful. But besides the amazing pocket-sized supercomputers and the satellite infrastructure that made my family’s group message possible, our exchange hinted at another amazing development that people often take for granted: food abundance.

My father grew up in a small Palestinian village in northern Israel, where most people were farmers. He was one of nine siblings and told stories of how chickens were slaughtered only on special occasions—red meat even rarer. A single bird was shared among a dozen people. “You were lucky if you got a drumstick,” my father said. Everything from feeding to slaughtering and plucking was done by hand. And without refrigeration, the meal had to be eaten at once.

By contrast, in the United States today, food is so cheap and plentiful that several relatives can volunteer to bring a whole turkey. At my local supermarket, frozen birds were recently on sale for $0.47 per pound. A 15-pound turkey, enough to feed a family, costs less than an hour’s minimum wage.

I am grateful for the world of superabundance, which has improved our lives and Thanksgiving holidays beyond what our ancestors could have dreamed. The fact that these interactions are commonplace enough to be taken for granted—communicating in real time across vast distances, flying across the country or around the world in hours, earning enough calories with a day’s wages to feed a family for a week—make our story of progress all the better.

This Thanksgiving, take a moment to consider how life has improved since the time of the Pilgrims. The food on your plate, the technology in your pocket, and the family who traveled long distances to be at the table were all made possible thanks to generations of compounding progress.

“Putting together the Thanksgiving dinner cost from the Farm Bureau and median weekly earnings back to 1986, we see perhaps a shocking trend for many weary grocery shoppers: 2025 is the most affordable year for the median worker to buy Thanksgiving dinner. It is much more affordable than in the past three years, and it even slightly beats 2020—that very weird year in our lives and for economic data, which had held the previous affordability record. Gale Pooley performs a similar analysis at Human Progress using a different measure of income (blue-collar worker wages) and finds a similar trend with 2025’s Thanksgiving meal requiring the fewest hours of work to purchase it.

Where can you find this mythical $55 dinner? If you think that doesn’t sound quite right, it may be due to where you live. The Farm Bureau reports that in the Northeast and West regions, the meal was over $60, while the South region was the cheapest at $50. Regardless of where you live, have no fear, the free market is working hard to deliver you an affordable meal. Thanks to our competitive grocery store market, retailers across the country are putting together meal plans for you, allowing you to feed your family for somewhere in the range of $4–$5 per person—very similar to the Farm Bureau survey (which is about $5.50 per person).”

From Cato Institute.