Unmanned farms depict a new agricultural landscape

In most people’s concepts, farms generally require people to operate. However, with the development of society and technological progress, unmanned farms have also been successfully realized. Using machines to replace manual labor and using new generation information technology to complete all farm production and management tasks, a 24-hour, full process, and full space unmanned production has become a trend.

Unmanned farms adopt new generation information technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence, 5G, and robots. Through remote control of farm facilities, equipment, machinery, or autonomous decision-making and operation of intelligent equipment and robots, they achieve an all-weather, full process, and full space unmanned production and operation mode.

The first unmanned rice farm in Guizhou was officially put into operation in Jianhe County; Beijing Youth Daily reported that on August 15, 2022, the first production oriented vegetable unmanned farm summary conference in Beijing was held at Yangfang Town Government in Changping District; On May 9, 2023, China Jiangsu Network reported that a total of 30 units in Jiangsu Province were selected as provincial-level “unmanned farms” for grain production.

Luo Xiwen, an academician of the CAE Member, used five highly generalized words to describe the unmanned farm: “the cultivation, management and collection of production links are fully covered; the hangar field transfer operation is fully automatic; the automatic obstacle avoidance and abnormal condition parking are safe; the crop production process is fully monitored; and the intelligent decision-making precision operation is completely unmanned.” The unmanned farm is one of the most important contents of modern agricultural construction, as a symbol of the most advanced agricultural productivity, The ‘unmanned farm’ is an important means of advancing to the commanding heights of global future agricultural development.

In developed countries, due to the vast land and sparse population, modern mechanical equipment is used for planting, maintenance, and harvesting of large areas of farmland, such as aircraft spraying pesticides and mechanized harvesting, greatly improving yield and efficiency. The large-scale use of mechanized agricultural machinery for production is a symbol of modern farms. Unmanned field farms, unmanned pig farms, unmanned fishing grounds, and intelligent and unmanned farming are important directions for the development of modern agriculture.

China is a large agricultural country with a large population, but the per capita arable land area is very small. The advantage of unmanned farms is to improve agricultural production quality, improve production efficiency, and reduce costs through technology. It not only solves the problem of agricultural product quality, but also brings benefits to the upgrading of the entire agricultural industry chain.

At present, China’s agricultural digital technology has developed rapidly. In the field of agricultural machinery navigation, a variety of intelligent agricultural machinery, such as unmanned rotary tillers, unmanned seeders, unmanned rice transplanters, unmanned highland gap wide spray and unmanned harvesters, have been developed, showing the rudiments of intelligent agriculture. With the maturity of application technology and the improvement of decision-making model accuracy in the future, Unmanned farms in China will also become a major trend in future agricultural development.