China Dream: Farms Without Farmers

Chinese propagandists breathlessly describe "unmanned farms" (无人农场) as "the new model for future agriculture," "the path to smart agriculture," and a solution to the problem of who will plant the crops in the future. They envision "farming without going to the fields" via an interconnected web of driverless tractors, seeding, planting and spraying equipment guided by satellites, drones, sensors, and irrigation pumps. China's ideal is to remove human decisions from the farming process by using sensors, big data, artificial intelligence, and other "smart" farming operations.

Chinese planners love schematics and fanciful engineering
drawings showing complex, colorful layouts.

China has been excited about "smart" farming for a while, but the unmanned farm idea seems to be new. A "Rural Revitalization Plan 2018-22"and a May 2019 "digital rural development strategic outline" called for development of smart agriculture, and the 2021 14th 5-year plan called for a digitized overhaul of agricultural production business and management using smart agricultural methods. In May 2022, China released a smart agricultural machinery technology road map. The 2020 plan for digital countryside included lots of plans for information technology and big data in farming, but the only reference to "unmanned farms" was a description of such farms in Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and South Korea. 

The first automated farms in China were built in 2018 in Shandong and Jiangsu Provinces. By the end of 2022 there were over 100 unmanned farm projects in 22 provinces covering 300,000 mu (20,000 hectares). The number doubled between 2020 and 2022. According to an "Unmanned Farm Development Report" issued in 2023 China's unmanned farming is in its initial stages of development in which government demonstration projects are set up on state-run farms to inspire wider adoption. The 5-year plan aims to "fully popularize" intelligent agricultural machinery and equipment for production of the main food crops in large contiguous fields in plains regions (that is, in flat places...presumably it's much more difficult if not impossible to implement full automation in hilly areas).

State farms in Heilongjiang and Ningxia Provinces are the featured models. Eight unmanned farms with nearly 20,000 pieces of smart farming equipment are operated by parts of the sprawling Beidahuang Group--the commercial arm of Heilongjiang's State Farm system along the Russian border. The project is supported by a collection of agricultural universities, the national meteorological satellite center, state-owned phone company China Mobile, real estate giant Country Garden (now in financial straits), several laboratories and an industrial park. 

The Ningxia Province State Farm group began its unmanned farm project in 2022 using 30,000 mu (2000 hectares) of farmland. In Hebei Province's Handan City they claim to have 25,000 mu operated as unmanned farms. Unmanned farming projects are also being set up by provincial and municipal agricultural officials in wealthy coastal regions of Zhejiang Province and Shanghai.

A model "unmanned" rice farm where no peasants work,
but lots of visiting rural officials stand around watching and taking photos. 

Liberation Daily said last month that the Shanghai government work report's plan to "build 30,000 mu of grain-producing unmanned farms" got a lot of attention. A Shanghai municipal plan for "high quality agricultural development 2021-25" aimed to set up digitized machinery management organizations and create 100,000 mu of unmanned grain farms. 

China is not a leader in smart farming; they are trying to keep up with developed countries. Liberation Daily said the project is inspired by a "new industrial revolution" involving big data, internet of things, and artificial intelligence propelling the "smart agriculture" era in Europe, America, Japan and South Korea. Foreign equipment will likely be excluded from China's smart farms, and the data collected will be walled off from foreign companies. China's national Beidou satellite navigation is mentioned as a core part of each unmanned farming project. Photos show Chinese-brand equipment. Liberation Daily emphasized that the value of the data collected by smart farming equipment may be even greater than the value of the farm products they produce. 

The unmanned farm project continues the century-old fascination of Chinese communists and their Soviet forebears with tractors, giant farms, and untested theories such as Trofim Lysenko's weird approach to breeding. The excitement over unmanned farms reflects a parallel contempt for troublesome peasant farmers who can now be replaced by young men with college degrees wielding tablet computers. The idea of eliminating labor from farming is appealing as China's population has tipped into decline and as its peasants age and lose interest in farming.

The unmanned farm concept also fits neatly into a new Xi Jinping-inspired "Thousand Village Demonstration and Ten Thousand Village Rectification" to overhaul the countryside by drawing up planned villages surrounded by vast fields, irrigation canals, electric lines and greenhouses.

Descriptions of the unmanned farm projects rattle off huge percentages of water, fertilizer, and pesticide that will be saved. They claim to be able to raise production by 10%. No one mentioned what might happen if the electricity fails, if the internet goes down, or if the system is hacked. There is no mention of the cost of purchasing, installing, maintaining the equipment, nor the cost of hiring operators.

The unmanned farms promise to increase farmers' income despite the prospect that none of them will be working on the farms anymore. 

China's ideal: a guy in spectacles running an unmanned tractor
from a cell phone.