North and South Dakota share many qualities in common:  their size, climate and topography, population composition and density, and politics are virtually the same.  Two other close neighbors with a common history, North and South Carolina, are also mirror images of each other.

So why are their laws and policies toward drones so dissimilar?

North Dakota and North Carolina are huge drone boosters.  North Dakota ranks #2 on a national drone “scorecard” published annually by the Virginia-based Mercatus Center.  North Carolina ranks #6. A high-level government task force in each state is heavily promoting drones as a force for economic development.  In addition, their respective legislatures have passed laws making it easier for drones to fly over private property and state and local roads.

If there is citizen opposition to drone flying in either state based on civil rights or privacy concerns, you rarely hear about it.

North Dakota even has an enormous business and aviation park devoted exclusively to drones.  It’s a whopping 217 acres.  The state has invited companies from all over the world to establish plants and offices there, with generous tax incentives to boot.  It’s also partnered with the US Air Force to create the largest drone flight testing site in the country.

North Carolina has no official drone “sandbox” but it’s one of the leading testing grounds for drone companies piloting “last mile” aerial deliveries for Walmart and other U.S. retailers.  And there are thousands of jobs available in both states for drone designers, data analysts, pilots and mechanics.

But cross each state’s southern border and support for drone industry development all but disappears.

South Carolina, which ranks #43 on the Mercatus list, and South Dakota which ranks even lower (#46) seem to want nothing at all to do with unmanned aerial vehicles. If North Dakota and North Carolina are two of  the nation’s most ardent drone cheerleaders, their southern counterparts are two of its most notorious naysayers.

These stark North-South contrasts are especially striking because of their geographic proximity.  But across the country, there are other sharp divergences in support for drones, based on broader regional patterns.

In the Deep South, Alabama (#40) and Mississippi (#46) also rank low on the Mercatus list.  Like South Carolina, these are deeply conservative states; and conservatives, more than liberals, tend to harbor an instinctive distrust of drones because of concerns over citizen privacy.

Legislators in these states regularly seek to pass legislation to restrict drone flying, especially over private property.  There is no central state body encouraging drone development.  State tax incentives are virtually non-existent.  Even law enforcement feels hamstrung in its pursuit of drones to battle crime – a cause that conservatives typically favor.

The same pattern can be found in clannish small town New England.  Rhode Island is the least drone-friendly state in the nation, according to the Mercatus Center.  Maine and Connecticut aren’t far behind.

By contrast, most of the mid-Atlantic states, including New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia are extremely open to drones.  Each has an executive-level task force eager to promote the industry’s development. Here again politics plays a role: these are uber-liberal “Blue” states eager to jump on the technology bandwagon.  Naysayers are likely to be viewed as Luddhites unwilling to embrace “progress.”

Each of these regions has at least one prominent outlier – Georgia in the South and Massachusetts in New England.  These outlier states aren’t as politically conservative as their regional neighbors, and they exude a more cosmopolitan openness to cutting edge IT technology trends.

But North Dakota?   It’s deeply conservative and located far from major population centers.  So is Oklahoma, which Mercatus ranks #1, and Montana, ranked #4.  Does any one factor explain their rise to prominence in Drone World?

Probably not, but all three – plus Minnesota, which is ranked #5 – are large rural states with vast prairie lands.  Drones need space in which to fly and be tested, free from the physical encumbrances and human safety risks found in the small densely populated states of  New England, for example.  It’s only natural that drone technology developers seek an opening in these states; in most cases, their leaders, regardless of party,  have responded favorably.

North Dakota, Oklahoma, Montana and Minnesota are also large farming states, which makes them the perfect testing ground for state-of-the-art techniques in “precision” agriculture.  Precision agriculture deploys drones equipped with sophisticated sensors and aerial spraying platforms to distribute seeds, fertilizer and pesticides to areas of a field most likely to maximize crop yields.  It slashes fuel and labor costs, eliminates farm input waste and enhances sustainability and allows American agribusiness to keep up with India and other global competitors – a key national priority

In fact, next to real estate, perhaps no other commercial application of drones is as important to industry as agriculture, which gives large, wide open farming states in the Upper Midwest a decided advantage.

Finally, there’s one other factor – sensitive and rarely remarked upon, but it’s there nonetheless: the presence of Native Americans.  Next to hosting a major US Air Force base, having a Native people residing in your state on vast underutilized land can also make it unusually “drone-friendly.”   Why?  Because Native American groups are ideally positioned politically to apply for – and indeed, more often than not, to win – major federal grants and contracts to support drone industry development.

Nowhere is this pattern clearer than in Oklahoma, which hosts 16% of the nation’s Native peoples, second only to Alaska (which is far too cold for drone flying).  Oklahoma has seen the largest growth of any Native population in the country since 2020 –a whopping 30%. Funding for drone technology development in Oklahoma typically includes a major ownership and beneficiary role for underserved Native Americans and their tribal organizations, operating in conjunction with colleges like Oklahoma State University.

In 2017, Oklahoma’s Choctaw Nation entered into a partnership with the FAA to become one of nine exclusive test sites for the integration of unmanned drones and conventional manned aircraft into a single centrally managed air traffic system. New Mexico’s Navajo Nation is now considering a partnership with Maryland-based firms to bring remote deliveries to millions of Native peoples.  Other indigenous nations in drone-friendly states, including North Carolina, may soon follow suit.

In the end, no single factor can explain why some states and regions are more open to drone development than others.  Instead, the diverse and sometimes cross-cutting influences of open space, low population density, a concentrated industry focus (especially in agriculture and IT), federal government support (through both the Pentagon and civilian agencies), liberal vs. conservative politics, and pressures from the global economy seem to favor some jurisdictions over others.  Currently, northern prairie states like North Dakota, Minnesota and Montana (plus Oklahoma), mid-Atlantic states like New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia, and a handful of outlier Southern states including North Carolina and Georgia are leading the pack.  But stay tuned: with the drone industry in a state of flux, they may not be for long.