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The Chinese government’s National Smart Agriculture Plan 2024-2028 foresees 10,000 smart farms, 1,000 agricultural factories, and 100 “farms of the future” with sensors, robots, and AI managing crops, a model tested at the Fuxi Farm of the Chinese Academy of Sciences which faces high costs and adoption challenges.
China is building farms where robots roam rice paddies while sensors buried in the soil measure humidity, temperature, and the presence of pests, all controlled by a manager operating a tablet from a command center kilometers away. The scenario described by the Chinese state media is from Fuxi Farm, a pilot project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) launched in 2023 in Hebei province, which has become a model for the National Smart Agriculture Plan 2024-2028, a program by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) that foresees the creation of 10,000 integrated digital farms by 2028 as part of a strategy to ensure food security for 1.4 billion inhabitants. “Traditional agriculture involves great unpredictability. But big data allows for simulation and predictive analysis for each stage, from planting to irrigation and pest control, so we can choose the best approach,” explained Zhang Yucheng, a senior engineer at the CAS Institute of Computing Technology, in an interview with People’s Daily Online in July 2025.
Behind the technological farms lies a historical trauma that China has never forgotten. The Great Famine between 1959 and 1962, during Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward,” caused between 15 and 45 million deaths according to different estimates and transformed food security into a permanent strategic priority that Deng Xiaoping’s reforms from 1978 consolidated and that the current smart farm program updates for the 21st century. About 460 million Chinese still live in rural areas, a reality that makes any agricultural reform a social policy of a scale that few countries in the world need to manage.
What is Fuxi Farm and how does it work in practice
Fuxi Farm is the living laboratory that demonstrates what Chinese smart farms aim to be on a large scale. Named after a mythological deity of agriculture in Chinese culture, the farm was created by CAS in 2023 with its technological headquarters in Xiong’an (Hebei) and has already been replicated in provinces such as Inner Mongolia, Chongqing, Anhui, and Hubei, where autonomous robots perform tasks in the field while a centralized artificial intelligence platform processes sensor data and suggests decisions on irrigation, fertilization, and pest control. Drones map the growth stage of crops and transmit real-time information to the command center that Hou Guangyu, Fuxi Farm’s agricultural manager, described to People’s Daily Online as “the brain of the entire farm.”
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The operation of smart farms does not eliminate human presence as some headlines suggest. Hou Guangyu is an example of a manager born after 1995 who operates robots via a tablet, a professional who combines agricultural knowledge with digital competence and represents the profile of rural worker that China wants to train on a large scale. The farms use autonomous tractors and robotic equipment, but supervision, strategic decision-making, and maintenance still depend on qualified people who interpret the data generated by artificial intelligence and correct the course when algorithms make mistakes.
What are the national plan’s goals for smart farms by 2028
The National Smart Agriculture Plan launched by the Ministry of Agriculture in October 2024 establishes a timeline with verifiable milestones. By 2026, the goal is to establish the basic smart agriculture public service structure with over 30% of agricultural processes operating based on digital information, and by 2028 the plan foresees 32% informatization coverage, 10,000 integrated digital farms, 1,000 digital agricultural factories, and 100 “future farms” that will serve as showcases of what technology can offer to the Chinese countryside. The program also sets a goal to develop more than 20 basic algorithms with Chinese intellectual property, an objective that reveals the dimension of technological sovereignty embedded in the farm plan.
The technologies already in use on pilot farms give a concrete dimension of what the national plan intends to scale. In Guangdong province, 69 sets of 5G-IoT sensors monitor lychee orchards in 20 cities according to Xinhua, while in Bengbu (Anhui) drones apply pesticides to corn crops, and in Zhejiang province robots perform lettuce transplanting in demonstration parks. The company Zoomlion Smart Agriculture has demonstrated digital techniques across 3.16 million mu (approximately 210,000 hectares), a scale that indicates how much Chinese smart farms have moved beyond the prototype stage to real-world operation.
What experts point to as limits of Chinese smart farms
The futuristic vision of technological farms faces concrete barriers that official Chinese sources openly acknowledge. Song Yang, R&D director at Zoomlion, admitted that “smart irrigation gates are still expensive” and that the technology requires soils with a high standard of flatness and fertility, a condition far from the reality of millions of small Chinese producers whose properties occupy irregular terrains with variable soil quality. The cost of implementing smart farms is a barrier that limits adoption to properties receiving heavy state subsidies, a model that relies on public funding to operate.
Xinhua news agency, an official vehicle of the Chinese government, acknowledges that “inconsistent data collection, privacy concerns, and limited adoption by farmers” are real obstacles to the expansion of artificial intelligence in the countryside. Liu Jingjing, a researcher linked to the Ministry of Agriculture, warned of the need to “strengthen infrastructure in rural areas to reduce barriers to AI access,” an acknowledgment that smart farms depend on stable connectivity and electricity that not all Chinese rural regions possess. The model of technological farms with centralized state planning, a demographic scale of 1.4 billion, and the political structure of the Chinese Communist Party is a specific combination that other countries would find difficult to replicate directly.
What China’s smart farms mean for Brazilian agribusiness
The technological revolution in the Chinese countryside has direct implications for Brazil that go beyond technological curiosity. China is the world’s largest importer of Brazilian soybeans, and the more Chinese agriculture advances in productivity with its smart farms, the more the balance of the global commodities market could change: greater Chinese efficiency in grain production could reduce demand for imports or, alternatively, free up Chinese land for higher-value crops while maintaining dependence on tropical commodities that Brazil supplies. The scenario is uncertain, but the direction is clear: what is planted on Anhui farms today could change what is sold to Beijing tomorrow.
Brazil operates a model of technological agriculture different from the Chinese but equally advanced in its segments. Embrapa develops digital agriculture solutions, field sensors, and artificial intelligence platforms for tropical agribusiness, but with smaller scale and funding than the Chinese Academy of Sciences, while Brazilian private agribusiness invests heavily in precision farms for soybeans, corn, and cotton with technologies that compete with what China presents in its showcases. The difference is that Chinese smart farms arise from a centralized state strategy for food security, while Brazilian ones arise from private initiative driven by market competitiveness, two models that reflect distinct political and economic realities but converge in the use of data, sensors, and artificial intelligence to produce more with less.
And you, do you think Brazil should invest more in smart farms like China? Is our agribusiness model prepared for this technological race? Leave your opinion in the comments.
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