Who Will Farm in China in the Future? Rural Areas Are Undergoing a Major Transformation

Standing at the edge of the field, 70-year-old Grandpa Li took out his mobile phone, but instead of calling his son, he opened the APP to check the progress of the pesticide spraying by the drone. When the screen showed "Homework Completed", he smiled and put away the tools: "Call it a day!" "Go home and take care of your grandson!"

This scene is truly unfolding in rural China. The once difficult situation where "the post-70s generation was unwilling to farm, the post-80s generation couldn't farm, and the post-90s generation didn't talk about farming" is now being broken by a group of unexpected "new farmers" who are tech-savvy.

Tech giants are now farming with keyboards on their backs!

Jack Ma no longer just focuses on e-commerce. The "1.8 Meter Technology" he invested in has built an intelligent fish farm in Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province. Underwater robots patrol 24 hours a day, and AI precise feeding saves 15% of the feed. Salmon are thriving in the "underwater machine room".

Huawei engineers are squatting in a tomato greenhouse in Shouguang, Shandong Province, debugging sensors. 5G networks enable automatic water and fertilizer proportioning, and AI determines the picking time based on the size of the fruits. The old vegetable grower exclaimed in amazement, "This tomato knows better than my son when to drink water!"

Even Gree, the air conditioner manufacturer, has come! They brought the temperature control technology of the factory building into the vegetable greenhouses, automatically adjusting the humidity and temperature, and the output of fruits and vegetables increased by 40%. Growing vegetables has brought about a sense of precision in a "dust-free workshop".

The state is also giving a strong push from behind

By 2025, the state has proposed to build 1,000 national-level "ecological farms", and subsidies can be obtained by renting 30 mu of land. 5G signals cover over 90% of the villages, drones are flying in the sky, and data is constantly being collected. Intelligent agricultural machinery has entered hilly and mountainous areas, and the old yellow cattle have officially "retired".

What’s even more surprising is that the young people are back!

Wang Lei, born in the 1990s, worked as a programmer in Shanghai for five years. Suddenly, he returned to his hometown and contracted 500 mu of land: "Now I can farm even by typing on the keyboard!" He installed the Beidou navigation system on the tractor, analyzed soil data with Python, and shared the trajectory of the rainbow pesticide sprayed by the drone on his Moments.

There are already 1.8 million licensed agricultural machinery operators and 950,000 agricultural service companies across the country. The 50,000 new farmers trained by Hema Fresh have an average age of only 32. They call themselves "agricultural engineers, wearing white coats and breeding in the laboratory." A set of work pants, programming in the fields.

The combination of new technologies and low-altitude economy is continuously driving the transformation of new agriculture. The agricultural and technological symbiosis composed of drones, sensors, AI algorithms and professional new farmers is continuously contributing to the transformation of new agriculture.

Farmland is turning into “green factories”

At 6 a.m., there was no one in sight in the vast wheat fields of Shandong Province. The intelligent harvester automatically dispatches goods from the warehouse and adjusts its route based on satellite cloud images, with a missed harvest rate of less than 1%. The harvested wheat was sold to urban mothers through Pinduoduo, and the price tripled.

Li Denghai, the 76-year-old "Grandpa Corn", is still working hard at the breeding base in Hainan. His laboratory, along with Jack Ma's fish farm and Ren Zhengfei's tomato AI, is forming a "technological symbiosis" in China's agriculture.

When young people use mobile phone apps to direct unmanned agricultural machinery, when old farmers monitor sensor data under the shade of trees, and when seeds in the laboratory explode in yield in smart farmlands - those bending over to work in Chinese farmlands are no longer lonely figures, but the entire technological era's active participation.

The harvest of the future lies in the hands of those who can write code.