Robotic arms assist agricultural production.（PHOTO: VCG）

By ZHAO Chunjiang

China's agriculture has entered a new digital era, with 4G, 5G and broadband networks becoming the symbols of the digital evolution.

Agriculture is now facing the third green revolution, namely the digital revolution in agriculture. From a technological point of view, the first two revolutions were concerned with varieties and biotechnology.

On the one hand, the third revolution has ushered in the development of agricultural digital economy, while on the other hand, it has brought significant changes in production modes, or smart agriculture.

Smart agriculture is a transformation of production modes due to the deep integration of information technology, intelligent industrial equipment and technology with a traditional agricultural industry.

Smart agriculture is not simply the application of information technology, but the transformation of production factors brought by the combination of multiple advanced production factors. Therefore, the development of smart agriculture in the future should not only consider a single technology,  but the entire system.

From the international point of view, smart agriculture has received much attention. The U.S. has already made smart agriculture an important aspect of their agricultural development strategy. In addition, the concept of 4.0 was put forward in the EU, which mainly refers to the interconnection of machines, the interaction between humans and machines, and the whole digital process of sensing and detection.

Global smart agriculture shows three development trends:

First, big data technology penetrates the whole agricultural industry chain, starting with breeding.

Second, the widely used intelligent equipment.

Third, farmers are lack of enthusiasm on agriculture which has always been treated as unprofitable industry.

China's agriculture is seeing transformation from a traditional production mode to smart agriculture. This transformation should include three aspects, namely modern and green production, machine-oriented transformation, and data science and intelligent decision-making based on big data. In the transformation process, Internet, sensors, and intelligent equipment are three main necessities.

(Zhao Chunjiang is academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering and an authoritative expert of agricultural information.)