Significance With the escalating global climate change and ecological pollution issues, the "dual carbon" target of Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality has been incorporated into various sectors of China's social development. To ensure the green and sustainable development of agriculture, it is imperative to minimize energy consumption and reduce pollution emissions at every stage of agricultural mechanization, meet the diversified needs of agricultural machinery and equipment in the era of intelligent information, and develop low-carbon agricultural mechanization. The development of low-carbon agricultural mechanization is not only an important part of the transformation and upgrading of agricultural mechanization in China but also an objective requirement for the sustainable development of agriculture under the "dual carbon" target. Progress] The connotation and objectives of low-carbon agricultural mechanization are clarified and the development logic of low-carbon agricultural mechanization from three dimensions: theoretical, practical, and systematic are expounded. The "triple-win" of life, production, and ecology is proposed, it is an important criterion for judging the functional realization of low-carbon agricultural mechanization system from a theoretical perspective. The necessity and urgency of low-carbon agricultural mechanization development from a practical perspective is revealed. The "human-machine-environment" system of low-carbon agricultural mechanization development is analyzed and the principles and feasibility of coordinated development of low-carbon agricultural mechanization based on a systemic perspective is explained. Furthermore, the deep-rooted reasons affecting the development of low-carbon agricultural mechanization from six aspects are analyzed: factor conditions, demand conditions, related and supporting industries, production entities, government, and opportunities. Conclusion and Prospects] Four approaches are proposed for the realization of low-carbon agricultural mechanization development: (1) Encouraging enterprises to implement agricultural machinery ecological design and green manufacturing throughout the life cycle through key and core technology research, government policies, and financial support; (2) Guiding agricultural entities to implement clean production operations in agricultural mechanization, including but not limited to innovative models of intensive agricultural land, exploration and promotion of new models of clean production in agricultural mechanization, and the construction of a carbon emission measurement system for agricultural low-carbonization; (3) Strengthening the guidance and implementation of the concept of socialized services for low-carbon agricultural machinery by government departments, constructing and improving a "8S" system of agricultural machinery operation services mainly consisting of Sale, Spare part, Service, Survey, Show, School, Service, and Scrap, to achieve the long-term development of dematerialized agricultural machinery socialized services and green shared operation system; (4) Starting from concept guidance, policy promotion, and financial support, comprehensively advancing the process of low-carbon disposal and green remanufacturing of retired and waste agricultural machinery by government departments.
Significance Agricultural machinery serves as the fundamental support for implementing advanced agricultural production concepts. The key challenge for the future development of smart agriculture lies in how to enhance the design, manufacturing, operation, and maintenance of these machines to fully leverage their capabilities. To address this, the concept of the digital twin has emerged as an innovative approach that integrates various information technologies and facilitates the integration of virtual and real-world interactions. By providing a deeper understanding of agricultural machinery and its operational processes, the digital twin offers solutions to the complexity encountered throughout the entire lifecycle, from design to recycling. Consequently, it contributes to an all-encompassing enhancement of the quality of agricultural machinery operations, enabling them to better meet the demands of agricultural production. Nevertheless, despite its significant potential, the adoption of the digital twin for agricultural machinery is still at an early stage, lacking the necessary theoretical guidance and methodological frameworks to inform its practical implementation. Progress Drawing upon the successful experiences of the author's team in the digital twin for agricultural machinery, this paper presents an overview of the research progress made in digital twin. It covers three main areas: The digital twin in a general sense, the digital twin in agriculture, and the digital twin for agricultural machinery. The digital twin is conceptualized as an abstract notion that combines model-based system engineering and cyber-physical systems, facilitating the integration of virtual and real-world environments. This paper elucidates the relevant concepts and implications of digital twin in the context of agricultural machinery. It points out that the digital twin for agricultural machinery aims to leverage advanced information technology to create virtual models that accurately describe agricultural machinery and its operational processes. These virtual models act as a carrier, driven by data, to facilitate interaction and integration between physical agricultural machinery and their digital counterparts, consequently yielding enhanced value. Additionally, it proposes a comprehensive framework comprising five key components: Physical entities, virtual models, data and connectivity, system services, and business applications. Each component's functions operational mechanism, and organizational structure are elucidated. The development of the digital twin for agricultural machinery is still in its conceptual phase, and it will require substantial time and effort to gradually enhance its capabilities. In order to advance further research and application of the digital twin in this domain, this paper integrates relevant theories and practical experiences to propose an implementation plan for the digital twin for agricultural machinery. The macroscopic development process encompasses three stages: Theoretical exploration, practical application, and summarization. The specific implementation process entails four key steps: Intelligent upgrading of agricultural machinery, establishment of information exchange channels, construction of virtual models, and development of digital twin business applications. The implementation of digital twin for agricultural machinery comprises four stages: Pre-research, planning, implementation, and evaluation. The digital twin serves as a crucial link and bridge between agricultural machinery and the smart agriculture. It not only facilitates the design and manufacturing of agricultural machinery, aligning them with the realities of agricultural production and supporting the advancement of advanced manufacturing capabilities, but also enhances the operation, maintenance, and management of agricultural production to better meet practical requirements. This, in turn, expedites the practical implementation of smart agriculture. To fully showcase the value of the digital twin for agricultural machinery, this paper addresses the existing challenges in the design, manufacturing, operation, and management of agricultural machinery. It expounds the methods by which the digital twin can address these challenges and provides a technical roadmap for empowering the design, manufacturing, operation, and management of agricultural machinery through the use of the digital twin. In tackling the critical issue of leveraging the digital twin to enhance the operational quality of agricultural machinery, this paper presents two research cases focusing on high-powered tractors and large combine harvesters. These cases validate the feasibility of the digital twin in improving the quality of plowing operations for high-powered tractors and the quality of grain harvesting for large combine harvesters. Conclusions and Prospects This paper serves as a reference for the development of research on digital twin for agricultural machinery, laying a theoretical foundation for empowering smart agriculture and intelligent equipment with the digital twin. The digital twin provides a new approach for the transformation and upgrade of agricultural machinery, offering a new path for enhancing the level of agricultural mechanization and presenting new ideas for realizing smart agriculture. However, existing digital twin for agricultural machinery is still in its early stages, and there are a series of issues that need to be explored. It is necessary to involve more professionals from relevant fields to advance the research in this area.
Significance Agricultural environment is dynamic and variable, with numerous factors affecting the growth of animals and plants and complex interactions. There are numerous factors that affect the growth of all kinds of animals and plants. There is a close but complex correlation between these factors such as air temperature, air humidity, illumination, soil temperature, soil humidity, diseases, pests, weeds and etc. Thus, farmers need agricultural knowledge to solve production problems. With the rapid development of internet technology, a vast amount of agricultural information and knowledge is available on the internet. However, due to the lack of effective organization, the utilization rate of these agricultural information knowledge is relatively low.How to analyze and generate production knowledge or decision cases from scattered and disordered information is a big challenge all over the world. Agricultural knowledge intelligent service technology is a good way to resolve the agricultural data problems such as low rank, low correlation, and poor interpretability of reasoning. It is also the key technology to improving the comprehensive prediction and decision-making analysis capabilities of the entire agricultural production process. It can eliminate the information barriers between agricultural knowledge, farmers, and consumers, and is more conducive to improve the production and quality of agricultural products, provide effective information services. Progress The definition, scope, and technical application of agricultural knowledge intelligence services are introduced in this paper. The demand for agricultural knowledge services are analyzed combining with artificial intelligence technology. Agricultural knowledge intelligent service technologies such as perceptual recognition, knowledge coupling, and inference decision-making are conducted. The characteristics of agricultural knowledge services are analyzed and summarized from multiple perspectives such as industrial demand, industrial upgrading, and technological development. The development history of agricultural knowledge services is introduced. Current problems and future trends are also discussed in the agricultural knowledge services field. Key issues in agricultural knowledge intelligence services such as animal and plant state recognition in complex and uncertain environments, multimodal data association knowledge extraction, and collaborative reasoning in multiple agricultural application scenarios have been discussed. Combining practical experience and theoretical research, a set of intelligent agricultural situation analysis service framework that covers the entire life cycle of agricultural animals and plants and combines knowledge cases is proposed. An agricultural situation perception framework has been built based on satellite air ground multi-channel perception platform and Internet real-time data. Multimodal knowledge coupling, multimodal knowledge graph construction and natural language processing technology have been used to converge and manage agricultural big data. Through knowledge reasoning decision-making, agricultural information mining and early warning have been carried out to provide users with multi-scenario agricultural knowledge services. Intelligent agricultural knowledge services have been designed such as multimodal fusion feature extraction, cross domain knowledge unified representation and graph construction, and complex and uncertain agricultural reasoning and decision-making. An agricultural knowledge intelligent service platform composed of cloud computing support environment, big data processing framework, knowledge organization management tools, and knowledge service application scenarios has been built. Rapid assembly and configuration management of agricultural knowledge services could be provide by the platform. The application threshold of artificial intelligence technology in agricultural knowledge services could be reduced. In this case, problems of agricultural users can be solved. A novel method for agricultural situation analysis and production decision-making is proposed. A full chain of intelligent knowledge application scenario is constructed. The scenarios include planning, management, harvest and operations during the agricultural before, during and after the whole process. Conclusions and Prospects The technology trend of agricultural knowledge intelligent service is summarized in five aspects. (1) Multi-scale sparse feature discovery and spatiotemporal situation recognition of agricultural conditions. The application effects of small sample migration discovery and target tracking in uncertain agricultural information acquisition and situation recognition are discussed. (2) The construction and self-evolution of agricultural cross media knowledge graph, which uses robust knowledge base and knowledge graph to analyze and gather high-level semantic information of cross media content. (3) In response to the difficulties in tracing the origin of complex agricultural conditions and the low accuracy of comprehensive prediction, multi granularity correlation and multi-mode collaborative inversion prediction of complex agricultural conditions is discussed. (4) The large language model (LLM) in the agricultural field based on generative artificial intelligence. ChatGPT and other LLMs can accurately mine agricultural data and automatically generate questions through large-scale computing power, solving the problems of user intention understanding and precise service under conditions of dispersed agricultural data, multi-source heterogeneity, high noise, low information density, and strong uncertainty. In addition, the agricultural LLM can also significantly improve the accuracy of intelligent algorithms such as identification, prediction and decision-making by combining strong algorithms with Big data and super computing power. These could bring important opportunities for large-scale intelligent agricultural production. (5) The construction of knowledge intelligence service platforms and new paradigm of knowledge service, integrating and innovating a self-evolving agricultural knowledge intelligence service cloud platform. Agricultural knowledge intelligent service technology will enhance the control ability of the whole agricultural production chain. It plays a technical support role in achieving the transformation of agricultural production from "observing the sky and working" to "knowing the sky and working". The intelligent agricultural application model of "knowledge empowerment" provides strong support for improving the quality and efficiency of the agricultural industry, as well as for the modernization transformation and upgrading.
Objective Deep learning is one of the most important technologies in the field of artificial intelligence, which has sparked a research boom in academic and engineering applications. It also shows strong application potential in remote sensing retrieval of geophysical parameters. The cross-disciplinary research is just beginning, and most deep learning applications in geosciences are still "black boxes", with most applications lacking physical significance, interpretability, and universality. In order to promote the application of artificial intelligence in geosciences and agriculture and cultivate interdisciplinary talents, a paradigm theory for geophysical parameter retrieval based on artificial intelligence coupled physics and statistical methods was proposed in this research. Methods The construction of the retrieval paradigm theory for geophysical parameters mainly included three parts: Firstly, physical logic deduction was performed based on the physical energy balance equation, and the inversion equation system was constructed theoretically which eliminated the ill conditioned problem of insufficient equations. Then, a fuzzy statistical method was constructed based on physical deduction. Representative solutions of physical methods were obtained through physical model simulation, and other representative solutions as the training and testing database for deep learning were obtained using multi-source data. Finally, deep learning achieved the goal of coupling physical and statistical methods through the use of representative solutions from physical and statistical methods as training and testing databases. Deep learning training and testing were aimed at obtaining curves of solutions from physical and statistical methods, thereby making deep learning physically meaningful and interpretable. Results and Discussions The conditions for determining the formation of a universal and physically interpretable paradigm were: (1) There must be a causal relationship between input and output variables (parameters); (2) In theory, a closed system of equations (with unknowns less than or equal to the number of equations) can be constructed between input and output variables (parameters), which means that the output parameters can be uniquely determined by the input parameters. If there is a strong causal relationship between input parameters (variables) and output parameters (variables), deep learning can be directly used for inversion. If there is a weak correlation between the input and output parameters, prior knowledge needs to be added to improve the inversion accuracy of the output parameters. The MODIS thermal infrared remote sensing data were used to retrieve land surface temperature, emissivity, near surface air temperature and atmospheric water vapor content as a case to prove the theory. When there was strong correlation between output parameters (LST and LSE) and input variables (BTi), using deep learning coupled with physical and statistical methods could obtain very high accuracy. When there was a weak correlation between the output parameter (NSAT) and the input variable (BTi), adding prior knowledge (LST and LSE) could improve the inversion accuracy and stability of the output parameter (NSAT). When there was partial strong correlation (WVC and BTi), adding prior knowledge (LST and LSE) could slightly improve accuracy and stability, but the error of prior knowledge (LST and LSE) may bring uncertainty, so prior knowledge could also be omitted. According to the inversion analysis of geophysical parameters of MODIS sensor thermal infrared band, bands 27, 28, 29 and 31 were more suitable for inversion of atmospheric water vapor content, and bands 28, 29, 31 and 32 were more suitable for inversion of surface temperature, Emissivity and near surface air temperature. If someone want to achieve the highest accuracy of four parameters, it was recommended to design the instrument with five bands (27, 28, 29, 31, 32) which were most suitable. If only four thermal infrared bands were designed, bands 27, 28, 31, and 32 should be given priority consideration. From the results of land surface temperature, emissivity, near surface air temperature and atmospheric water vapor content retrieved from MODIS data using this theory, it was not only more accurate than traditional methods, but also could reduce some bands, reduce satellite load and improve satellite life. Especially, this theoretical method overcomes the influence of the MODIS official algorithm (day/night algorithm) on sudden changes in surface types and long-term lack of continuous data, which leads to unstable accuracy of the inversion product. The analysis results showed that the proposed theory and conditions are feasible, and the accuracy and applicability were better than traditional methods. The theory and judgment conditions of geophysical parameter retrieval paradigms were also applicable for target recognition such as remote sensing classification, but it needed to be interpreted from a different perspective. For example, the feature information extracted by different convolutional kernels must be able to uniquely determine the target. Under satisfying with the conditions of paradigm theory, the inversion of geophysical parameters based on artificial intelligence is the best choice. Conclusions The geophysical parameter retrieval paradigm theory based on artificial intelligence proposed in this study can overcome the shortcomings of traditional retrieval methods, especially remote sensing parameter retrieval, which simplify the inversion process and improve the inversion accuracy. At the same time, it can optimize the design of satellite sensors. The proposal of this theory is of milestone significance in the history of geophysical parameter retrieval.
Accurate and efficient monitoring of animal information, timely analysis of animal physiological and physical health conditions, and automatic feeding and farming management combined with intelligent technologies are of great significance for large-scale livestock farming. Deep learning techniques, with automatic feature extraction and powerful image representation capabilities, solve many visual challenges, and are more suitable for application in monitoring animal information in complex livestock farming environments. In order to further analyze the research and application of artificial intelligence technology in intelligent animal farming, this paper presents the current state of research on deep learning techniques for tag detection recognition, body condition evaluation and weight estimation, and behavior recognition and quantitative analysis for cattle, sheep and pigs. Among them, target detection and recognition is conducive to the construction of electronic archives of individual animals, on which basis the body condition and weight information, behavior information and health status of animals can be related, which is also the trend of intelligent animal farming. At present, intelligent animal farming still faces many problems and challenges, such as the existence of multiple perspectives, multi-scale, multiple scenarios and even small sample size of a certain behavior in data samples, which greatly increases the detection difficulty and the generalization of intelligent technology application. In addition, animal breeding and animal habits are a long-term process. How to accurately monitor the animal health information in real time and effectively feed it back to the producer is also a technical difficulty. According to the actual feeding and management needs of animal farming, the development of intelligent animal farming is prospected and put forward. First, enrich the samples and build a multi perspective dataset, and combine semi supervised or small sample learning methods to improve the generalization ability of in-depth learning models, so as to realize the perception and analysis of the animal's physical environment. Secondly, the unified cooperation and harmonious development of human, intelligent equipment and breeding animals will improve the breeding efficiency and management level as a whole. Third, the deep integration of big data, deep learning technology and animal farming will greatly promote the development of intelligent animal farming. Last, research on the interpretability and security of artificial intelligence technology represented by deep learning model in the breeding field. And other development suggestions to further promote intelligent animal farming. Aiming at the progress of research application of deep learning in livestock smart farming, it provides reference for the modernization and intelligent development of livestock farming.
Enhancing resource use efficiency in agricultural field management and breeding high-performance crop varieties are crucial approaches for securing crop yield and mitigating negative environmental impact of crop production. Crop stress sensing and plant phenotyping systems are integral to variable-rate (VR) field management and high-throughput plant phenotyping (HTPP), with both sharing similarities in hardware and data processing techniques. Crop stress sensing systems for VR field management have been studied for decades, aiming to establish more sustainable management practices. Concurrently, significant advancements in HTPP system development have provided a technological foundation for reducing conventional phenotyping costs. In this paper, we present a systematic review of crop stress sensing systems employed in VR field management, followed by an introduction to the sensors and data pipelines commonly used in field HTPP systems. State-of-the-art sensing and decision-making methodologies for irrigation scheduling, nitrogen application, and pesticide spraying are categorized based on the degree of modern sensor and model integration. We highlight the data processing pipelines of three ground-based field HTPP systems developed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Furthermore, we discuss current challenges and propose potential solutions for field HTPP research. Recent progress in artificial intelligence, robotic platforms, and innovative instruments is expected to significantly enhance system performance, encouraging broader adoption by breeders. Direct quantification of major plant physiological processes may represent one of next research frontiers in field HTPP, offering valuable phenotypic data for crop breeding under increasingly unpredictable weather conditions. This review can offer a distinct perspective, benefiting both research communities in a novel manner.
Agriculture is a basic industry deeply related to the national economy and people's livelihood, while it is also a weak industry. There are some problems with traditional agricultural risk management research methods, such as insufficient mining of nonlinear information, low accuracy and poor robustness. Artificial intelligence(AI) has powerful functions such as strong nonlinear fitting, end-to-end modeling, feature self-learning based on big data, which can solve the above problems well. The research progress of artificial intelligence technology in agricultural vulnerability assessment, agricultural risk prediction and agricultural damage assessment were first analyzed in this paper, and the following conclusions were obtained: 1. The feature importance assessment of AI in agricultural vulnerability assessment lacks scientific and effective verification indicators, and the application method makes it impossible to compare the advantages and disadvantages of multiple AI models. Therefore, it is suggested to use subjective and objective methods for evaluation; 2. In risk prediction, it is found that with the increase of prediction time, the prediction ability of machine learning model tends to decline. Overfitting is a common problem in risk prediction, and there are few researches on the mining of spatial information of graph data; 3. Complex agricultural production environment and varied application scenarios are important factors affecting the accuracy of damage assessment. Improving the feature extraction ability and robustness of deep learning models is a key and difficult issue to be overcome in future technological development. Then, in view of the performance improvement problem and small sample problem existing in the application process of AI technology, corresponding solutions were put forward. For the performance improvement problem, according to the user's familiarity with artificial intelligence, a variety of model comparison method, model group method and neural network structure optimization method can be used respectively to improve the performance of the model; For the problem of small samples, data augmentation, GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) and transfer learning can often be combined to increase the amount of input data of the model, enhance the robustness of the model, accelerate the training speed of the model and improve the accuracy of model recognition. Finally, the applications of AI in agricultural risk management were prospected: In the future, AI algorithm could be considered in the construction of agricultural vulnerability curve; In view of the relationship between upstream and downstream of agricultural industry chain and agriculture-related industries, the graph neural network can be used more in the future to further study the agricultural price risk prediction; In the modeling process of future damage assessment, more professional knowledge related to the assessment target can be introduced to enhance the feature learning of the target, and expanding the small sample data is also the key subject of future research.
Waterfowl farming in China is developing rapidly in the direction of large-scale, standardization and intelligence. The research and application of intelligent farming equipment and information technology is the key to promote the healthy and sustainable development of waterfowl farming, which is important to improve the output efficiency of waterfowl farming, reduce the reliance on labor in the production process, fit the development concept of green and environmental protection and achieve high-quality transformational development. In this paper, the latest research and inventions of intelligent waterfowl equipment, waterfowl shed environment intelligent control technology and intelligent waterfowl feeding, drinking water, dosing and disinfection and automatic manure treatment equipment were introduced. At present, compared to pigs, chickens and cattle, the intelligent equipment of waterfowl are still relatively backward. Most waterfowl houses are equipped with chicken equipment directly, lacking improvements for waterfowl. Moreover, the linkage between the equipment is poor and not integrated with the breeding mode and shed structure of waterfowl, resulting in low utilization. Therefore, there is a need to develop and improve equipment for the physiological growth characteristics of waterfowl from the perspective of their breeding welfare. In addition, the latest research advances in the application of real-time production information collection and intelligent management technologies were present. The information collection technologies included visual imaging technology, sound capture systems, and wearable sensors were present. Since the researches of ducks and geese is few, the research of poultry field, which can provide a reference for the waterfowl were also summarized. The research of information perception and processing of waterfowl is currently in its initial stage. Information collection techniques need to be further tailored to the physiological growth characteristics of waterfowl, and better deep learning models need to be established. The waterfowl management platform, taking the intelligent management platform developed by South China Agricultural University as an example were also described. Finally, the intelligent application of the waterfowl industry was pointed out, and the future trends of intelligent farming with the development of mechanized and intelligent equipment for waterfowl in China to improve the recommendations were analyzed. The current waterfowl farming is in urgent need of intelligent equipment reform and upgrading of the industry for support. In the future, intelligent equipment for waterfowl, information perception methods and control platforms are in urgent to be developed. When upgrading the industry, it is necessary to develop a development strategy that fits the current waterfowl farming model in China.
The wide application of advanced information technologies such as big data, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence in agriculture has promoted the modernization of agriculture in rural areas and the development of smart agriculture. This trend has also led to the boost of demands for technology and knowledge from a large amount of agricultural business entities. Faced with problems such as dispersiveness of knowledges, hysteric knowledge update, inadequate agricultural information service and prominent contradiction between supply and demand of knowledge, the agricultural knowledge service has become an important engine for the transformation, upgrading and high-quality development of agriculture. To better facilitate the agriculture modernization in China, the research and application perspectives of agricultural knowledge services were summarized and analyzed. According to the whole life cycle of agricultural data, based on the whole agricultural industry chain, a systematic framework for the construction of agricultural intelligent knowledge service systems towards the requirement of agricultural business entities was proposed. Three layers of techniques in necessity were designed, ranging from AIoT-based agricultural situation perception to big data aggregation and governance, and from agricultural knowledge organization to computation/mining based on knowledge graph and then to multi-scenario-based agricultural intelligent knowledge service. A wide range of key technologies with comprehensive discussion on their applications in agricultural intelligent knowledge service were summarized, including the aerial and ground integrated Artificial Intelligence & Internet-of-Things (AIoT) full-dimensional of agricultural condition perception, multi-source heterogeneous agricultural big data aggregation/governance, knowledge modeling, knowledge extraction, knowledge fusion, knowledge reasoning, cross-media retrieval, intelligent question answering, personalized recommendation, decision support. At the end, the future development trends and countermeasures were discussed, from the aspects of agricultural data acquisition, model construction, knowledge organization, intelligent knowledge service technology and application promotion. It can be concluded that the agricultural intelligent knowledge service is the key to resolve the contradiction between supply and demand of agricultural knowledge service, can provide support in the realization of the advance from agricultural cross-media data analytics to knowledge reasoning, and promote the upgrade of agricultural knowledge service to be more personalized, more precise and more intelligent. Agricultural knowledge service is also an important support for agricultural science and technologies to be more self-reliance, modernized, and facilitates substantial development and upgrading of them in a more effective manner.
As an emerging concept, metaverse has attracted extensive attention from industry, academia and scientific research field. The combination of agriculture and metaverse will greatly promote the development of agricultural informatization and agricultural intelligence, provide new impetus for the transformation and upgrading of agricultural intelligence. Firstly, to expound feasibility of the application research of metaverse in agriculture, the basic principle and key technologies of agriculture metaverse were briefly described, such as blockchain, non-fungible token, 5G/6G, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, 3D reconstruction, cloud computing, edge computing, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, brain computer interface, digital twins and parallel system. Then, the main scenarios of three agricultural applications of metaverse in the fields of virtual farm, agricultural teaching system and agricultural product traceability system were discussed. Among them, virtual farm is one of the most important applications of agricultural metaverse. Agricultural metaverse can help the growth of crops and the raising of livestock and poultry in the field of agricultural production, provide a three-dimensional and visual virtual leisure agricultural experience, provide virtual characters in the field of agricultural product promotion. The agricultural metaverse teaching system can provide virtual agricultural teaching similar to natural scenes, save training time and improve training efficiency by means of fragmentation. Traceability of agricultural products can let consumers know the production information of agricultural products and feel more confident about enterprises and products. Finally, the challenges in the development of agricultural metaverse were summarized in the aspects of difficulties in establishing agricultural metaverse system, weak communication foundation of agricultural metaverse, immature agricultural metaverse hardware equipment and uncertain agricultural meta universe operation, and the future development directions of agricultural metaverse were prospected. In the future, researches on the application of metaverse, agricultural growth mechanism, and low power wireless communication technologies are suggested to be carried out. A rural broadband network covering households can be established. The industrialization application of agricultural meta universe can be promoted. This review can provide theoretical references and technical supports for the development of metaverse in the field of agriculture.
This paper described the concept and basic satisfaction of scientific and technological revolution, defines the endogenous and exogenous agricultural disruptive technology. The revolution of agricultural science and technology refers to the process in which the key disruptive core technology innovation applied to agricultural production drives a series of technological innovations adopted in production. Endogenous disruptive technology in agriculture refers to technology indicators that can fundamentally change the original technology, such as productivity improvement, overturn the economic or social necessity of the adoption of the original technology, and completely replace the original technology. Particularly the paper puts forwards the concept of the transboundary technology and demonstrates its endogenous application and impacts on the development of agricultural industry. The transboundary technology for exogenous application refers to the technology whose original invention and innovation are applied in non-agricultural fields and has nothing to do with agricultural industry. Focusing on smart agriculture and the typical transboundary technology, the paper analyzed the characteristics of the smart agriculture, discussed its impacts on the traditional agricultural production and rural transformation. Smart agriculture technology will be the disruptive core technology to promote a new round of technological and industrial revolution and rural transformation. It will fundamentally change the production mode of traditional agriculture, realize factory production and promote the revolutionary transformation of rural areas. The production and application of smart agricultural technology in China has shown good economic and social benefits and great potential for production and application. However, the application of intelligent agricultural technology based on artificial intelligence technology is still in the exploratory stage. As an agricultural application of transboundary technology, the smart agricultural technology with intelligent sensing technology as the core is not dominated by agricultural scientists like agricultural machinery technology revolution, chemical technology revolution and green revolution technology. At present, the application smart agriculture technology in China is only in its infancy. Hence, policy recommendations of strengthening key disruptive technology development, reforming agricultural higher education system, promoting the agricultural industry development of the transboundary technology, and pushing the application of smart agriculture technology to be implemented in high standard farmland and large-scale farms of agricultural production, etc., were proposed to promote the development of smart agriculture.
Raman spectroscopy is a type of scattering spectroscopy with features such as rapid, less susceptible to moisture interference, no sample pre-treatment and in vivo detection. As a powerful characterization tool for analyzing and testing the molecular composition and structure of substances, Raman spectroscopy is also playing an extremely important role in the detection of plant and animal phenotypes, food safety, soil and water quality in the agricultural field with the continuous improvement of Raman spectroscopy technology. In this paper, the detection principles of Raman spectroscopy are introduced, and the new progresses of eight Raman spectroscopy technology are summarized, including confocal microscopy Raman spectroscopy, Fourier transform Raman spectroscopy, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, resonance Raman spectroscopy, spatially shifted Raman spectroscopy, frequency-shifted excitation Raman difference spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy based on nonlinear optics, etc. And their advantages and disadvantages and application scenarios are prerented, respectively. The applications of Raman spectroscopy in plant detection, soil detection, water quality detection, food detection, etc. are summarized. It can be specifically subdivided into plant phenotype, plant stress, soil pesticide residue detection, soil colony detection, soil nutrient detection, food pesticide detection, food quality detection, food adulteration detection, and water quality detection. In future agricultural applications, the elimination of fluorescence background due to complex living organisms in Raman spectroscopy is the next research direction. The study of stable enhanced substrates is an important direction in the application of Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS). In order to meet the measurement of different scenarios, portable and telemetric Raman spectrometers will also play an important role in the future. Raman spectroscopy needs to be further explored for a wide variety of research objects in agriculture, especially for applications in animal science, for which there is still a paucity of relevant studies up to now. In the existing field of agricultural research, it is necessary to pursue the characterization of more specific substances by Raman spectroscopy, which can prompt the application of Raman spectroscopy for a wider range of uses in agriculture. Further, the pursuit of lower detection limits and higher stability for practical applications is also the direction of development of Raman spectroscopy in the field of agriculture. Finally, the challenges that need to be solved and the future development directions of Raman spectroscopy are proposed in the field of agriculture in order to bring more inspiration to future agricultural production and research.
Intelligent equipment is necessary to ensure stable, high-quality, and efficient production of facility agriculture. Among them, intelligent harvesting equipment needs to be designed and developed according to the characteristics of fruits and vegetables, so there is little large-scale mechanization. The intelligent harvesting equipment in Japan has nearly 40 years of research and development history since the 1980s, and the review of its research and development products has specific inspiration and reference significance. First, the preferential policies that can be used for harvesting robots in the support policies of the government and banks to promote the development of facility agriculture were introduced. Then, the development of agricultural robots in Japan was reviewed. The top ten fruits and vegetables in the greenhouse were selected, and the harvesting research of tomato, eggplant, green pepper, cucumber, melon, asparagus, and strawberry harvesting robots based on the combination of agricultural machinery and agronomy was analyzed. Next, the commercialized solutions for tomato, green pepper, and strawberry harvesting system were detailed and reviewed. Among them, taking the green pepper harvesting robot developed by the start-up company AGRIST Ltd. in recent years as an example, the harvesting robot developed by the company based on the Internet of Things technology and artificial intelligence algorithms was explained. This harvesting robot can work 24 h a day and can control the robot's operation through the network. Then, the typical strawberry harvesting robot that had undergone four generations of prototype development were reviewed. The fourth-generation system was a systematic solution developed by the company and researchers. It consisted of high-density movable seedbeds and a harvesting robot with the advantages of high space utilization, all-day work, and intelligent quality grading. The strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and future trends of prototype and industrialized solutions developed by universities were also summarized. Finally, suggestions for accelerating the development of intelligent, smart, and industrialized harvesting robots in China's facility agriculture were provided.
Crop 3-dimensional (3D) reconstruction is one of the most fundamental techniques in crop phenomics, and is an important tool to accurately describe the holographic structure of crop morphology. 3D reconstruction models of crops are important for high-throughput crop phenotype acquisition, crop plant characteristics evaluation, and plant structure and phenotype correlation analysis. In order to promote and popularize the 3D reconstruction technology in crop phenotype research, the basic methods and application characteristics, the current advances of research and the prospects of 3D reconstruction in crops were review in this paper. Firstly, the existing methods of crop 3D reconstruction were summarized, the basic principles of each method were reviewed, the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of each method were analyzed, the applicability of each method on the basis of the general process of crop 3D reconstruction methods were introduced, and the specific process and considerations for the implementation of each method were summarized. Secondly, the application of crop 3D reconstruction were divided into three parts: single crop reconstruction, field group reconstruction and root system, according to different target objects, and the applications of crop 3D reconstruction technology from these three perspectives were reviewed, the research advances of each method for different crop 3D reconstruction based on accuracy, speed and cost were explored, and the problems and challenges of crop 3D reconstruction in the context of different reconstruction objects were organized. Finally, the prospects of crop 3D reconstruction technology were analyzed.
Chemical plant protection, which refers to using plant protection machinery sprays chemical pesticides, is the most important technology for pest and disease control at present, an important technical guarantee for food security, and also is essential for safeguarding agricultural production. Pesticide, spray technology and plant protection machinery are called the three pillars of chemical plant protection, which having been becoming a hot research topic in the world. Efficient, precise and intelligent spray technology and equipment can provide guarantee for the improvement of pesticide efficacy and utilization. With the issues of agricultural product safety and environmental protection getting more and more attention from the public, the research and development direction of Chinese plant protection field will gradually turn to intelligent and precision spraying technology and equipment. Since 2010 year, the great development potential and application value of intelligent and precision spraying technologies and equipment have been widely recognized worldwide. In this article, the main precision spraying technologies were reviewed, the research status, typical representative and application progress of plant protection equipment in different working scenarios were classified and summarized. The challenges in the development of precision spraying were analyzed, the countermeasures and suggestions were put forward. This research can provide new methods and new ideas not only for implementation of China's pesticide reduction plan, the promotion of intelligent plant protection equipment and precision spraying technology, but for the development of modern agriculture.
Agricultural models, agricultural artificial intelligent, and data analysis technology, etc., exist in whole processes of information perceiving, transmission, processing and control for smart agriculture， thus they are the core technology of smart agriculture. To furtherly make the substances and functions of agricultural models clear, facilitate its further research and application, drive smart agriculture development with healthy, steady, and sustainable, methods of systematic analysis, comparison, and chart for relationship, etc. were used in this research. The definition, classification, functions of the agricultural models were theoretically analyzed. The relationships between the agricultural models and the elements and processes of the smart agriculture were expounded, which made the functions of agricultural models clear, provided some agricultural models examples applied in the smart agriculture. The important studies and application progresses of agricultural models were reviewed. The comparison results of agricultural models showed that the 4 levels of agricultural biological elements, 6 scales of agricultural environmental elements, 6 administrative levels of agricultural technological and economic elements, and the relevant approaches for modeling agricultural system need to be considered. The research and application of multi-space scales on environment elements in the agricultural models would have the larger potential. The combination of agricultural models with molecular genetics, perceiving, and artificial intelligence, the collaboration among public and private researchers, and food security challenges have been an important power for further development of agricultural models, linking agricultural models with various agricultural system modeling, databases, harmonious and open data, and decision-making support systems (DSS) would be focus on. The research and application of the agricultural models in China have formed crop model series with Chinese characteristics, joined in the world trends of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), the smart agriculture, and so on. They should be speedy graspe chances and accelerate development. The agricultural models is a quantitative express of relationships within or among the agricultural system elements. An important method with epistemological values of quantifying and synthesizing agricultural sciences, and will play an indispensible role in data achieving and processing for the smart agriculture combining perceiving techniques, and become a significant bridge and bond.
Global change and natural disturbances have already caused a severe co-epidemic of crop pests and diseases, such as aphids, fusarium, rust, and powdery mildew. These threats may result in serious deterioration of grain yield and quality. Traditionally, crop pests and diseases are monitored by visual inspection of individual plants, which is time-consuming and inefficient. Besides, the distribution of different infected wheat patches are hard to identify through manual scouting. However, the spatial scale difference of remote sensing observation directly affects the remote sensing diagnosis mechanism and monitoring method of pests and diseases. The differences in pest and disease characterization and monitoring mechanisms promote the development of the remote sensing-based monitoring technology at different spatial scales, and the complementarity of multi-spatial data sources (remote sensing, meteorology, plant protection, etc.) increase the chance of the precision monitoring of the occurrence and development of pest and disease. As a non-destructive way of collecting ground information, remote sensing technologies have been proved to be feasible in crop pests and diseases monitoring and forecasting. Meanwhile, many crop diseases and pests monitoring and alarming systems have been developed to manage and control agricultural practices. Based on the description of physiological mechanism that crop diseases and pests stressed spectral response, some effective spectral wavelengths, remote sensing monitoring technologies, and crop pests and disease monitoring and forecasting system were summarized and sorted in this paper. In addition, challenge problems of key technology on monitoring crop diseases and pests with remote sensing was also pointed out, and some possible solutions and tendencies were also provided. This article detailed revealed the researches on the remote sensing based monitoring methods on detection and classification of crop pests and diseases with the challenges of regional-scale, multi-source, and multi-temporal data. In addition, we also reviewed the remote sensing monitoring of pests and diseases that meet the characteristics of different remote sensing spatial scale data and precise plant protection and control needs. Finally, we investigated the current development of the pest and disease monitoring systems which integrated the research and application of the existing crop pest and disease monitoring and early warning model. In summary, this review will prove a new perspective for sustainable agriculture from the current researches, thus, new technology for earth observation and habitat monitoring will not only directly benefit crop production through better pest and disease management but through the biophysical controls on pest and disease emergence. Application of UAVs, image processing to insect/disease detection and control should be directly transferable to other pests and diseases, with feedbacks into UAV and EO capabilities for the mapping and management of these agricultural risks. Similarly, these vision systems open other possibilities for farm robotics such as mechanical rather than manual pesticide usage for below crop canopy pest surveying.
With the rapid development of information technology and the steady growth of the agricultural and rural economy, agricultural information technology has attracted more and more attention, and the trend of capital and technology playing important roles in the agricultural field has gradually formed. In recent years, large Internet enterprises have begun to enter the agricultural industry and smart agriculture has developed strongly. This paper analyzed the status and technical application characteristics of large-scale Internet companies engaged in agriculture; explained the reasons why the current technology and capital entered the agricultural field in large numbers, especially in the context of the world science and technology revolution and China's economic and social status, analyzed the key areas and problems of the combination of technology, capital and agricultural industry; analyzed the application boundary, application prospects of information technology in the agricultural field. In view of the digital development and application of new technology in agricultural and rural areas, this paper put forward some policy suggestions. Firstly, strengthen policy guidance and support to prevent market speculation risks; secondly, built a system and mechanism for the convergence and integration of Internet enterprises and agricultural industries; thirdly, focus on cutting-edge key technologies and strengthen efforts to promote scientific and technological innovation; finally speed up the dynamic follow-up of technology achievement transformation, strengthen supervision and do a good job in leading and demonstration drive. The key priority is to focus on the world’s cutting-edge technology and key application technology, strengthen the dominant position of technological innovation of enterprises, and combine with the specific practice of production, circulation and consumption of China’s agricultural industry to fully promote the innovation and application of China’s agricultural information technology. And the main research contents included summarize the successful examples carefully, doing a good job in publicity and guidance, and promoting the typical leads vigorously so that they can be copied, popularized and applied; for the failure cases, learn from the insufficient lessons to prevent the recurrence of similar cases; for the advanced practical technology formed by Internet enterprises, promote technology sharing and information sharing on the premise of protecting intellectual property rights and turn it into a new driving force for the development of agricultural modernization. Only by applying the latest achievement of modern information technology to the practice of agricultural production and becoming the representative of agricultural productivity, can we truly contribute to the development of modern agriculture and rural areas in China and the wing of information.
The fine breeding of livestock and poultry facilities is the frontier of the development of modern animal husbandry. The core of the fine breeding of livestock and poultry facilities lies in the deep integration of the "Internet of Things+" with traditional farming facilities. In recent years, with the withdrawal of more and more individual family-based breeding models, the management methods of livestock and poultry farms in China have gradually moved towards intensification, large scale,and automated facilitation. The traditional family-style livestock and poultry management experience is falling behind and gradually withdrawing from the historical stage. The refined farming of livestock and poultry facilities based on the individual animal management and quality assurance of farmed animals and animal welfare requirements have become the latest development trend of livestock and poultry farming industry. The rapid development of digital and network technology will provide new opportunities for the organic combination of animal husbandry production, animal welfare, information management and sustainable utilization of natural resources. Economic benefit, animal health and welfare, refinement of production process management and product quality are three key factors that affect the sustainable development of animal husbandry. In this paper, based on expounding the importance of the information sensing and the environmental regulation and control of the fine breeding livestock and poultry facilities, a cutting-edge technology of the information sensing and the environmental regulation and control of the livestock and poultry facilities was introduced; problems and challenges to be faced with were analyzed; and it was concluded that the smart sensor technology would become the base driving force for progress of livestock and fine poultry breeding facilities, taking account of the welfare of livestock and animal performance of animal anthropomorphizing intelligent control technology and strategy is facing significant challenges. In the field of pig farming, the core direction is mechanized production mode, which is light simplification, feed hygiene and animal health. In the field of cattle farming, the main direction is the automation of the whole chain of forage and the safety of its enclosure facilities. In the field of milking technology, the frontier of technological innovation is to further improve milking efficiency and quality, milking process, low disturbance milk metering, and cow individual milk production prediction. In the field of poultry production, similar to cattle farming, more attention is paid to the improvement of engineering processes such as bedding, environment and drinking water. Finally the paper put forward suggestions on how to implement the key technologies of fine farming of livestock and poultry facilities in China, with purpose of providing theoretical reference and technical support for the transformation, upgrading sustainable development of livestock and poultry breeding industry.
Along with the increasing awareness of environmental protection and growing demand for green and pollution-free agricultural products, it has a great need to explore new ways to apply greener pest control methods in agricultural production. Researching on Solar Insecticidal Lamps (SILs) has continuously received incremental attentions from both the academia and industry, which brings a new mode for the preventing and controlling of agricultural migratory pests with phototaxis feature, and now is becoming to a hot research topic. Towards the fast development of "precision agriculture" and "smart agriculture" as well as the increasing demands for agricultural informatization, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely used for agricultural information collection and intelligent control of agricultural equipment. WSNs are suitable for large-scale deployment and regional monitoring, which can be easily combined with SIL nodes. Based on the combination, a new type of agricultural Internet of things - Solar Insecticidal Lamps Internet of Things (SIL-IoTs) was proposed and the technology of WSNs for the prevention and control of phototactic migratory pests in agricultural applications were surveyed. Firstly, the state-of-art insecticidal lamps applications was reviewed and their characteristics deployment manners and working lifetime in the production of crops (e.g., forest, fruits, rice, vegetables) were summarized. Secondly, the characteristics of existing GSM/3G/4G-enabled SIL nodes and their latest research status on SIL-IoTs were summarized. Furthermore, the research status was analyzed concerning the energy harvesting mode and deployment characteristics of SIL, which are solar energy SIL harvesting mode for energy saving and the heuristic mode for node deployment, respectively. Finally, towards the fast-developed vision of smart agriculture, in which various emerging IT and automation technologies are maturely applied, SIL-IoTs can be considered as a new and important component to contribute to the green agricultural pest monitoring and control. To further enhance SIL-IoTs' capability and enrich SIL-IoTs' function, four open research issues on SIL-IoTs were proposed, i.e., 1) optimized deployment scheme of SIL-IoTs with multiple constrains, 2) optimized and adaptive energy management strategy for ensuring normal working hours of SIL node, 3) lack of algorithms for pests outbreak area localization, and 4) interference on data transmission because of dense high voltage discharge during severe pest disaster. To sum up, SIL-IoTs is one of the representative applications of "precision agriculture" and "smart agriculture" based on WSNs, which is a new model on prevention and control of pests. The combination of both optimized deployment algorithms of SIL-IoTs nodes and artificial intelligence techniques will provide a theoretical basis for SIL-based applications in terms of optimized deployment and energy management. Intelligent pest information collection, alarm, and node' senergy management via SIL-IoTs will facilitate decisions-makings for precise agricultural applications in prevention and control of pests.
China has high total apple output, but the export volume is low. The high-end apple market is mostly occupied by imported apples. The main reason of this situation is the lack of technologies and equipments for fruit quality classification, and the degree of automation after picking stands low. The apples enter the consumer market without simple roughing processing, and the quality of the apple is unstable, which greatly reduces its market competitiveness. In this paper, the status quo of non-destructive detection and grading technology of apple quality was analyzed, then the development was forecasted. Apple non-destructive detection technology mainly includes spectrum, electrical characteristics, CT, chromatography, electronic nose and computer vision technology. According to the functional characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of various technologies, it is proposed to develop apple odor detection method based on new sensor technology; adopting multi-feature grading method based on machine vision, the combination of apple quality non-destructive testing technology and grading technology can promote the improvement of apple's industrial competitiveness. Overall, the needs of apple quality non-destructive detection and grading technology development in China are urgent. Detections with new technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and artificial intelligence methods of sensor technology and products in apple non-destructive, quality grading detection and multi-technology have great potential. A real-time, efficient, high-precision grading systems in apple quality which integrates electricity, light, gas and computer vision may be an important development direction for improving apple's quality and enhancing the competitiveness of the apple industry.
UAV plant protection operation faces very complicated environmental conditions. On one hand, its ultra low altitude operations are vulnerable to ground structures and basic hydropower facilities; on the other hand, the effectiveness of plant protection operation is strong, and it is necessary to spray the pesticides to the specific parts of crops at the prescribed time so as to ensure good pesticide application effect. At present, UAV plant protection technology mainly refers to the existing mature technology and flight platform in general aviation field to basically "fly and spray". However, the lack of penetrating research and theoretical guidance on environmental perception in farmland operation, the movement mechanism of droplets under the rotor airflow, and the penetrability of the droplet to different crops canopy lead to low penetration rate of the UAV plant protection operation, easy drifting, frequent accidents, large damage probability and low comprehensive operational efficiency. Benefiting from the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, parallel computing technology and intelligent hardware, the UAV plant protection technology is developing in the direction of intellectualization, systematization and precision. The real-time perception of the environment under non established conditions, intelligent job decision method based on intelligent recognition of crop diseases and pests, the control of the toward-target pesticide spraying control based on the variable of wind field droplet deposition model and the data based job evaluation system have gradually become the key technology of the UAV intelligent plant protection. The manuscript analyzed and summarized the research status and technical achievements in the field of UAV intelligent plant protection from the field information perception, the modeling and optimization control of accurate pesticide application, the evaluation and monitoring of the operation effect. Based on the existing research, the research also predicted the development trend of the key technologies of intelligent UAV plant protection in the future. The clustering method of hyper-spectral image acquisition and computational intelligence based deep learning recognition will become the key technology for real-time and efficient acquisition of crop target information in plant protection work, which greatly improves the accuracy of remote sensing information inversion recognition; machine vision and multi machine cooperative sensing technology can acquire dynamic information of field operation at multiple levels and time; the high precision droplet spectrum control technology independently controlled by nozzle design and the precision variable spraying control technology based on the wind field model can further improve the droplet deposition effect and reduce the liquid drifting; the breakthrough of high accuracy mesh solution technology will change the prediction mode of droplet drift from artificial experience judgment to computer simulation and numerical deduction; the job path planning technology will greatly improve the efficiency of multi machine and multi area operation and reduce the distance of invalid operation; the job quality evaluation based on the real-time data of the sensor and the operation supervision system of large data technology will replace people to effectively control the process of the UAV plant protection operation, achieve data and transparency of plant protection, and ensure the process is observable and controllable.
