[Big read] China’s smart farms boost output, but can farmers afford the upgrade?

(Edited and refined by Bai Kelei, with the assistance of AI translation. Photos: Sim Tze Wei/SPH Media)

With a tap on a mobile phone, five autonomous rice harvesters started up simultaneously and the swishing, rustling and rumbling of machinery kicked off our harvesting demonstration in the paddy fields of Qixing Farm in Beidahuang, Heilongjiang.

The harvesters, with the BeiDou navigation system installed in place of a driver, moved and turned automatically along pre-set routes. Sailing on a sea of gold, they harvested, threshed and cleaned rice grains. Using such technology, new-generation farmers monitor operations in real time through a mobile phone without having to enter the fields. For city dwellers seeing autonomous machinery move through grain fields at night for the first time, the scene may feel somewhat surreal. At a press conference, Heilongjiang vice-governor Cong Li described her first encounter with this, calling it “both magical and rather eerie”.

From sickles to screens

Behind this sense of awe lies the evolution of Chinese agriculture from relying on the weather to relying on electronic screens, and from manual labour to smart machinery. Farmers once rolled up their trouser legs and entered the fields with sickles. After reform and opening up, tractors and combine harvesters were gradually adopted, followed in recent years by autonomous farm machinery. Machines are replacing more than toil — they are also reducing reliance on labour in light of fewer young rural workers and a rapidly ageing population.

For a populous country of more than 1.4 billion, agricultural technology must ultimately address not only whether machines can operate autonomously, but whether it can reliably produce more food to better meet market demand given the limited land available.

China suffered a major famine from 1959 to 1962. Since then, food security has been a priority, while maintaining 1.8 billion mu (1.2 million square kilometres or around 12.5% of China’s total land area) of arable land also became a red line.

At the Central Economic Work Conference in December 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping said, “China is a big country with a large population, and ensuring that our people have enough to eat has always been the top priority in governance.”

The meeting proposed a national food security strategy of “putting China first, basing efforts on domestic supply, ensuring production capacity, allowing moderate imports and relying on technological support”. It emphasised achieving basic self-sufficiency in total grains and absolute security in staple grains supplies.

More than a decade later, China’s food production capacity has risen significantly. In 2024, the country’s overall mechanisation rate for crop cultivation and harvesting reached 75.64%, meeting the target set under the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021 to 2025) a year ahead of schedule. Mechanisation rates for rice, wheat, maize and soya beans reached 89.18%, 98%, 92.23% and 89.42% respectively, while the number of unmanned aerial vehicles used for crop protection reached 201,000.

Dilemma over feed and staples

But food security does not mean that supply-and-demand pressures have been eliminated. At a press conference held by the State Council Information Office (SCIO) on 29 September, Agriculture and Rural Affairs Minister Zhang Zhu said China’s grain output had remained above 1.4 trillion jin (700 billion kg) for two consecutive years, with per capita grain availability exceeding 500 kg, providing ample food security. At the same time, however, grain supply and demand remained in a “tight balance”, and the structure of grain supply still needed to be optimised.

The main reason is that Chinese diets are changing. Consumption of rice and flour-based staples is declining, while consumption of meat, eggs, milk and other non-staple foods is rising, and livestock farming requires large quantities of feed grains such as maize and soya beans. Zhang described this shift as “less demand for staple grains and more for feed grains”, adding that total demand for grains would continue to rise. He also noted that droughts have a greater impact on agriculture since their effects are more widespread, while floods tend to be contained. Zhang added that while flooding was more severe than drought this year, overall weather conditions remained favourable.

Food security is not merely about whether there is enough grain. It also concerns what to grow, how to grow it, how to raise yields, and which food supplies to supplement through international markets. These questions of how to keep raising output on limited farmland, and what to plant are particularly acute for Heilongjiang, China’s major grain-producing region and its largest soya bean-producing province.

Since the 18th Chinese Communist Party Congress in 2012, Xi has visited Heilongjiang four times and stressed that the province must “serve as the ballast of national food security”. During a visit to Heilongjiang arranged by the SCIO ahead of the National Day holiday, when the autumn harvest was under way, local officials repeatedly told reporters that “one in every nine bowls of rice nationwide comes from Heilongjiang”.

Heilongjiang mainly grows maize, rice and soya beans. Its highest output is maize, followed by rice, while it also accounts for about 43% of China’s soya bean output. Last year, Heilongjiang produced 82 million tonnes of grain, ranking first nationwide for 16 consecutive years. Rice is linked to staple grain security, while maize and soya beans are closely tied to demand for feed and edible oil.

Since China-US trade friction intensified, China has focused on increasing soya bean cultivation and raising yields. Domestic soya bean production exceeded 20 million tonnes for the first time in 2022 and reached 20.91 million tonnes in 2025, but this was still insufficient to change its heavy reliance on imports. In its latest analysis in September, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) raised its forecast for China’s soya bean imports in 2025/26 to 108 million tonnes, or nearly 90% of total consumption. Imported soya beans are mainly used for feed and oil extraction. Actual imports for the whole of 2025 reached a record 112 million tonnes, of which about three-quarters came from Brazil, followed by the US and Argentina.

In recent years, China has expanded soya bean cultivation, raised per-unit yields and reduced planting risks for farmers through policies like subsidies for soya bean producers, grain-soya bean crop rotation and yield improvement.

But land is limited, and rice, maize and soya beans each have their own demands. Qin Xingguo, director of the Agricultural Information Division at MARA’s Department of Crop Management, described soya beans as a “structural issue”. He explained that it is not as simple as reducing other crops to expand soya bean cultivation. While “prices are a weather vane”, Qin noted that farmers weigh the prices, costs and returns of different crops before deciding what to grow.

Such trade-offs in planting patterns are also evident in Heilongjiang. Meng Qingshan, director of the Smart Agriculture and Agricultural Machinery Centre at Beidahuang Group’s Qixing Farm in Jiansanjiang, said the region has more than 12 million mu (8,000 square kilometres) of arable land. Around ten million mu are planted with rice, while soya beans and maize account for a combined total of more than two million mu. Soya beans and maize are grown in rotation to protect the province’s highly fertile black soil.

Smart machinery boosts field efficiency

Besides increasing domestic soya bean production on limited farmland, China must also secure supplies from abroad and lower its risk of doing so through diversifying its sources.

Another challenge for Heilongjiang is how to leverage agricultural technology to maximise yield.

Liu Jianguo, senior manager at the Smart Agriculture and Agricultural Machinery Centre at Beidahuang Group’s Qixing Farm, shared that the positioning error of autonomous harvesters using the BeiDou navigation system is only 2.5 cm. This allows a user to control five harvesters simultaneously using a mobile phone. The usage of autonomous farm machinery reduces human error, so that “every inch of land is properly used and output maximised”.

Yang Shengbin, project director for grain harvesters at Jiamusi Jichi Tractor Manufacturing, said the key to smart farm machinery was not simply that it could operate without a driver. More importantly, machines must be able to adjust operating parameters according to crop moisture levels, ambient humidity and plot conditions.

At the Jiansanjiang National Agricultural Science and Technology Park, technology intervention starts from the soil. Jin Lijun, deputy director of the Qixing Farm Agricultural Technology Promotion Centre, said fertiliser is applied precisely according to soil test results. This dynamically maintains nutrient balance and the long-term productivity of the black soil.

In Wuchang, which is renowned for its rice, party secretary and chairman of Qiaofu Dayuan Agricultural Company Qiao Wenzhi said at a media briefing that the company had worked with the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences for more than a decade to improve the Daohuaxiang No. 2 rice variety. The joint research includes breeding new varieties and improving cold resistance and standability.

Addressing the risks posed by extreme weather, Zhang Shaobo, deputy general manager of Beidahuang Chuangye Farm Company, cited early preventive measures based on weather warnings.

Li Yucheng, a major grain grower in Huachuan County, described his experience. In the past, farmers treated diseases and pests after discovering them. Now, they can use monitoring data on weather and soil moisture to make early assessments and take preventive steps. “Science made me realise that I didn’t know how to farm, but with smart farms, I found my footing again,” Li said. He added that smart farms require less labour, “freeing us from the land and allowing us to find happiness again”.

Song Jinxing, a staff member at Weichai Lovol Yitian Intelligent Agriculture who was responsible for the Qixing Farm demonstration, said integrated solutions covering ploughing, planting, management and harvesting were being developed for smart agriculture. However, it remained difficult to fully automate every stage of agricultural production. He also observed that smart equipment and data-driven management had lowered barriers to entry, allowing young people to participate in agricultural production.

Economic barriers for smallholders

Large farms have contiguous plots of land that allow large machinery to operate efficiently. For smallholders, however, the problem is not only equipment cost, but also the lack of sufficient land to justify such costs.

Yang Haiyan, sales director at Jiamusi Jichi Tractor Manufacturing, said a maize combine harvester costs nearly 700,000 RMB (US$104,400), while a high-horsepower hybrid tractor costs about 1 million RMB. Such powerful machinery requires contiguous land. If the plots are too fragmented, frequent turning and moving between fields wastes time and raises costs. The company’s project director Yang Shengbin said that as land-use rights are transferred and more people move to cities, large farm machinery will become more useful.

Beyond the economics, land transfer also involves the farmers’ emotional attachment to their land. MARA director Qin observed that for some older farmers, their land is not only a source of income but also psychological support. “For ordinary people, having a few mu of land keeps them busy.” Heilongjiang locals said that older farmers are reluctant to place land under managed cultivation due to traditional beliefs about leaving land behind for descendants, unease about handing land over, and disagreements over profit-sharing terms.

There remain technological and cost barriers to ordinary households adopting the technology. The Economic Daily quoted Wang Yubin, a professor at China Agricultural University, as saying that problems with modern agricultural equipment include high costs and difficult operation and maintenance; smallholder farmers “either cannot afford it or cannot use it properly”. An article published on the Cyberspace Administration of China website in September also called for a “suitable and low-cost” approach to smart agriculture with shared services to address the pain points of smallholders.

Heilongjiang’s autonomous farm machinery and smart farms directly address the question of how to improve agricultural efficiency. But for technology to help secure the food supply of more than 1.4 billion people, it must reach ordinary farmers at lower cost. Keeping rice bowls full requires not only technology, but also adjustments to planting patterns and imports to make up for domestic shortfalls in supplies such as soya beans.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “端牢14亿人饭碗 黑龙江“大粮仓”向科技要粮”.

Related: Soybeans, canola and power: How China turned food into a strategic weapon | Coding crops: How AI is sowing change in rural China