In Zigui, Hubei, drones equipped with "AI brains" shuttle through mountainous orchards, automatically identifying complex terrain features such as ridges, ditches, and utility poles; In Maoming, Guangdong, the lychee industry big data platform has completed the localization deployment of DeepSeek, making disease and pest diagnosis more efficient and accurate... "AI+agriculture" has made many attempts in recent years. With the continuous upgrading of AI big model technology, what opportunities will agriculture face in various fields and links? How effective are these attempts? The reporter conducted an interview. Breeding is equipped with an "accelerator" in Gongzhuling, Jilin. In the boundless corn experimental field, a robot is shuttling between the green leaves, taking clear images of the plants... Professor Chen Jian from China Agricultural University showed a video to reporters. In the picture, it is the research achievement of him and his team - an intelligent breeding robot equipped with the domestic AI seed industry model "Fengdeng". What are the functions of breeding robots? How to replace manual labor? The well-known Mr. Yuan Longping is a breeder Chen Jian told reporters, "In the past, breeding new varieties relied on breeders to observe and experiment in the field for a long time. Not only was it difficult, but the breeding cycle was also relatively long." What Chen Jian and his team are doing is to let intelligent robots observe and judge crops in the field, and preliminarily screen out plants that may have potential high-quality genes such as high yield and disease resistance, for breeders to further test and experiment. The emergence of robots is to replace the laborious but relatively low tech jobs of breeders in the past Chen Jian said. With the empowerment of AI big models, compared to traditional agricultural machinery, intelligent breeding robots can not only execute commands, but also autonomously complete human like associative reasoning. For example, based on the characteristics of corn plant height and the number of ears, it can be determined whether it belongs to the potential dominant plant and decide whether to adjust the key perception of the travel trajectory. Chen Jian introduced that a robot can complete the inspection of 2.5 acres of farmland per hour; Hundreds or thousands of robots working simultaneously can achieve a leap in quantity. After completing the initial screening based on the observation results, the number of plants that need to be tested in the laboratory has been significantly reduced, and the breeding cycle has been significantly shortened. In the laboratory, AI can also help researchers quickly find common gene fragments of advantageous plants. AI can play a role in both phenotype detection and gene analysis stages. It's like putting an accelerator on breeding Chen Jian said. How important is breeding for the development of agriculture? Seeds are the "chip" of agriculture, and the seed industry is a strategic and fundamental core industry of the country. Just like Mr. Yuan Longping's super rice has benefited the whole world, we hope to use AI to accelerate breeding and enable crops such as wheat and corn to grow in harsh environments such as plateaus, Gobi, and saline alkali land. "Chen Jian said," This way, China's food security will be more guaranteed, and human rice bowls will become more stable. "With" new agricultural tools, "besides serving breeding, what changes will AI bring to the lives of ordinary farmers? In Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, Xia Hongyu, the general manager of Jurong Chuntian Ecological Agriculture Development Co., Ltd., operates an unmanned farm located in Hezhuang Village, Maoshan Town. For him, AI has brought tangible human liberation and increased productivity. Xia Hongyu told reporters that in the past, when using agricultural machinery, people needed to "mark" the map and manually plan the route; Nowadays, with Beidou+5G high-precision positioning technology and AI intelligent algorithms, agricultural machinery can autonomously plan paths and automatically avoid obstacles. In terms of pest control, weeding, etc., AI can comprehensively obtain the pest situation and crop growth in the first time by recognizing video surveillance and work photos, which is often faster and more accurate than human judgment. Through renovation, the total grain yield per unit area of the farm has significantly increased from 2023 to the present He said. In recent years, with the support of technologies such as big data, 5G, and the Internet of Things, AI is becoming a "new agricultural tool" for many places to grow tomatoes, lychees, blueberries, and even pigs and cows. Taking agricultural drones as an example. At present, most common brands of drones on the market are equipped with AI functions, which can undertake tasks such as spraying pesticides, fertilizing, sowing, transportation, and monitoring disaster situations. According to Han Jun, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, at the "Ministerial Channel" of this year's National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the current number of agricultural drones in China exceeds 200000, with an operating area of over 400 million acres. Ordinary farmers often adopt the model of renting drone services from cooperatives or companies, "Chen Jian said." In this way, machines can be dispatched and fully utilized across provinces, and the cost borne by farmers is also reduced. "The widespread application of AI models, especially the popularization of functions such as image recognition and voice recognition, has also lowered the information access threshold for rural groups. In recent days, a 38 year old village branch secretary named Lv Hongyan in Jiaohe City, Jilin Province, has become popular online. In the video, he teaches older villagers how to communicate with AI and solve daily problems in raising cattle and farming. The popularization of AI has greatly improved the ability of villagers to solve problems independently He sighed. To promote "AI going to the countryside", the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs has partnered with Tencent to launch the "Farmer Revitalization Plan", which plans to provide free AI tool training for rural governance backbone and leaders of new agricultural management entities over a period of three years. The full chain empowerment of "production, supply, and marketing" AI in agriculture is not only horizontally expanding in breeding, planting, breeding, fisheries, and other fields, but also vertically expanding in production and processing, warehousing and logistics, digital marketing, and other links. Lingshan in Guangxi is a famous hometown of lychee, with the largest lychee planting scale in Guangxi and the second largest in the country. However, due to limitations in preservation technology, logistics efficiency, and sales channels, the high-quality Lingshan lychee is not well-known, and the profits of fruit farmers are not high. The use of AI provides inspiration for solving these problems. After lychee picking, with the help of AI image recognition technology, grading and sorting can be completed based on size and color. Different grades of fruits can be automatically allocated to different sales channels to achieve maximum profit; Subsequently, AI algorithms can quickly match orders with inventory to ensure that the lychee sent to consumers is fresh enough; In addition, in the deep processing of agricultural products, AI can also arrange various tasks such as raw material procurement, production line establishment, weighing and payment like managing a small factory. In the marketing process, various AI tools have entered e-commerce platforms, becoming a "handy weapon" for thousands of new farmers. Taking Taobao as an example, from merchant operation to consumer experience, every link has AI based tool innovation, including precise advertising placement, creating posters with text and images, AI customer service querying logistics information, automatic generation of live streaming scripts... The platform also provides free tutorials for various tools to help farmers get started faster. This has reduced the cost of agricultural product marketing to varying degrees and improved operational efficiency. As the oldest industry in human society, agriculture faces complex challenges in its development and transformation. This means that the integration of AI and agriculture is not that simple. On the one hand, 'a clever woman cannot cook without rice', and AI agricultural models cannot do without high-quality agricultural data. However, agricultural data has characteristics such as regionalism, seasonality, diversity, and periodicity, and its complexity is significantly higher than other industries. On the other hand, compared to other industries, agriculture has a smaller profit margin and higher costs for developing and maintaining AI systems. According to industry insiders, the current application of AI in the agricultural field is mostly in the experimental demonstration stage and has not yet formed a replicable business model; The application of AI in the entire agricultural production, supply, and marketing chain is still distributed in a scattered manner, and has not been fully integrated. How to solve these problems? More thinking is needed from all parties involved. Complex data? The National Data Administration, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and other relevant departments are working to reduce obstacles to the development and utilization of agricultural data elements through measures such as developing unified standards and building industrial cloud service platforms. How to promote the comprehensive integration of AI into the entire agricultural production, supply, and marketing chain? To use real application scenarios as anchor points, multi-party collaboration and long-term investment are necessary. Financial and policy support is also indispensable. Experts have pointed out that in order to truly achieve the vision of agricultural intelligence, the degree of industrial modernization also needs to be "matched". Including promoting production through sales, developing "contract agriculture", and helping to solve the problems of "not being able to sell" and "not being able to sell at a good price"; Promote further "scaling up" of land transfer and management trusteeship, as well as accelerate the "organization" of agriculture, and explore new models of joint participation by state-owned enterprises, village collectives, and farmers. There is another question facing people: as AI increasingly participates in various aspects of agricultural production, supply, and sales, what kind of changes will this ancient industry of agriculture undergo? Chen Jian believes that in the future, agriculture will further rely on intelligent equipment. The role of farmers will be transformed into managers, responsible for supervising and coordinating the work of robots. I hope that in the future, when it comes to 'farmers', people will not first think of' hard work ', but rather see it as a high-tech career choice Chen Jian told reporters. (New Society)