XAG have hosted the Smart Agriculture Conference (SAC 2020), in Beijing this December, co-organised by the Chinese National Precision Agricultural Aviation Centre and partnered with Alipay.
Agricultural experts, government officials, foreign diplomats and agri-business from around the world convened to share views on developing human-centred innovation for a smart agriculture ecosystem.
The conference featured XAG’s new product launch as well as a Smart Agriculture Report published by global strategy consultancy CLEAR. The report clarified the definitions regarding digital agriculture, precision agriculture and smart agriculture and was expounded upon by Justin Gong, Co-founder and Vice President of XAG.
Digital agriculture is the technology that digitalises the planning, process and result of agricultural production, such as big data, AI, cloud computing and blockchain.
Precision agriculture is the agricultural technology that harnesses information technology to achieve precision management, such as drone, robot and intelligent irrigation.
Smart agriculture is the all-new agricultural production mode and ecosystem based on digital agriculture and precision agriculture. It creates new production scenarios to cope with population explosion, climate change and food crisis.
The Smart Agriculture Report also identified the biggest emerging opportunities with the objective to sustainably feed the populated world with high-quality, nutritious food. Five important emerging trends were identified, set to radically reshape the future of agriculture:
- The 5G revolution
- Robotic labour
- Cross-border technology
- Disintermediation of the supply chain
- An increasing demand for transparency
The report also identified Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Biotechnology as three fundamental variables to have an enormous effect on future agriculture.
The requirement of manufactures to evolve beyond a purely ‘engineering mindset’ and adopt a human-centred approach in order to unleash the potential of smart agriculture was also discussed, as well as the development of digitalisation and blockchain technology in order to enhance visibility, transparency and traceability within supply chains.
SAC 2020 saw the XAG release of the R80 Agricultural Utility Vehicle (XAU), the AutoPilot Console (XAPC) and the Smart Agriculture System (XSAS).
Dedicated to building digital farming infrastructure, developing precision farming equipment and creating a smart agriculture ecosystem, XAG’s new releases complement existing drone-based solutions and automate agricultural processes such as planting, seeding, management and harvesting.
XAUV R80 is an autonomous, multifunctional farm robot which allows third-party payloads and adapts to both plain fields and sloped terrains. While inheriting XAG’s technical advantages in centimetre-level RTK navigation and variable-rate application, XAUV R80 can support 80L payload capacity and embark different agricultural devices, such as JetSprayer and XIoT, for orchard spraying, open field weeding, crop monitoring and farm transportation.
As an automated steering system, XAPC is designed to improve operation precision and performance of medium-to-large agricultural equipment, such as tractors and harvesters. Simply connected to smartphone or tablet and primed by easy tabs, XAPC provides access to RTK high-accuracy navigation network which helps avoid skips, overlaps and crop damage.
XAG Smart Agriculture System provides smallholders and farm owners with meticulous production management solutions from seeding, fertilisation and crop protection to harvesting. With simple interface and rich toolkit, XSAS integrates precision farming devices, agricultural IoT and AI to build scientific crop model, digitalise farming logs and achieve in-season crop growth objectives.
