A recent joint initiative by the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has produced the Digital Village High-Quality Development Action Plan (2026-2030), setting out a systematic strategy for digital village growth during the 15th Five-Year Plan period.
The plan states that by 2030, digital village development should achieve notable results, and farmers should enjoy a stronger sense of gain, happiness, and security from sharing the fruits of information technology. This means digital and intelligent achievements must move beyond demonstration parks and reach ordinary farming households, so that farmers can truly perceive, use, and benefit from them in a sustainable way.
Many small and medium-sized farmers have limited capacity to invest in and use digital technology. For digital villages and smart agriculture to move from pilot applications to large-scale adoption, they must rely on technology and a stable, sustainable extension service mechanism.
For a large number of small and medium-sized farmers, building a complete digital system for every field is neither economical nor realistic. A more feasible path is to rely on modern comprehensive agricultural service centers to turn scattered digital technologies into shared, sustainable agricultural services.
The plan emphasizes the role of modern comprehensive agricultural service centers in improving the digital and intelligent level of agricultural socialized services. As regional comprehensive agricultural service hubs, these centers can coordinate services in agricultural technology, inputs, machinery, processing, logistics, and sales.
On this basis, they can build unified digital systems, equip intelligent devices, and cultivate professional teams to serve more business entities. This can dilute the cost per household through scaled services and also make up for the insufficient digital literacy of some farmers, ensuring that advanced technologies are taught, used, and continuously supported.
To make modern comprehensive agricultural services truly precise and efficient, support from multiple digital capabilities is needed. First, the plan proposes establishing digital archives for rural cultivated land. Agricultural production has clear spatial differences and temporal changes. Different plots of the same farmer may differ in soil conditions, moisture, crop growth, and management needs.
Using plots as the basic unit, information on soil, weather, water and fertilizer, crop growth, pests and diseases, farming operations, and yield and quality should be continuously accumulated to form dynamically updated digital archives. In this way, service centers can focus from farmers to plots, further determining which field, at what time, and what kind of service is needed, making services more detailed and accurate.
On this basis, efforts should also focus on improving the practicality of agricultural artificial intelligence technology. The plan calls for strengthening core algorithm research and promoting collaborative innovation among digital technology, agricultural machinery, and agronomy. Agricultural AI should integrate agronomic knowledge, crop mechanisms, and expert experience into models, while also continuously improving the adaptability of algorithms to different regions, crops, growth stages, and production conditions, and relying on real field data to continuously verify and correct models.
More importantly, the accuracy and stability of current agricultural AI algorithms and large models in complex field environments are still insufficient to directly replace professional agronomic judgment. Therefore, at this stage, they are more suitable as auxiliary tools for agricultural service personnel. AI-generated farming suggestions must be reviewed and approved by professional service personnel before being provided to farmers.
At the same time, intelligent agricultural machinery and agricultural robots should be promoted from single-machine intelligence to systematic services. The plan proposes accelerating the research, development, and promotion of intelligent agricultural machinery and equipment and conducting unmanned agricultural machinery operation trials in depth. An important purpose of the trials is to continuously reduce use costs, improve operational reliability, and enhance practical work in real agricultural scenarios, laying the foundation for large-scale application.
On this basis, intelligent agricultural machinery, drones, agricultural robots, and other equipment should be further linked with plot digital archives and agricultural AI models, so that operation tasks can be precisely generated and dispatched in a timely manner according to plot conditions and production needs, and continuously optimized based on operation results. Only by further transforming intelligent equipment into stable, low-cost, shareable operation service capabilities and integrating them into the modern agricultural service system can more farmers truly use them and use them well.
During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, digital villages and smart agriculture should not only continue to strengthen technological research and development, but also pay more attention to delivering digital and intelligent capabilities to fields through improved service systems. The evaluation of digital technology application results should also shift more from whether it has been built to whether agriculture has increased production and efficiency, whether farmers have increased income, whether services have improved quality, and whether results can be continuously promoted.
As technology, services, and application mechanisms continue to mature, digital village and smart agriculture demonstration bonsai will gradually connect into a landscape of development benefiting more farmers.