NUPIAO Reporter |
Above the endless rice paddies of Liantang Village in Guangzhou’s Huangpu District, agricultural drones skim low along AI-mapped routes, drizzling a fine mist of crop protection over the leaves. Down between the rows, an unmanned farm vehicle trundles along a preset path, its twin nozzles delivering atomized liquid without a single human hand on the controls.
Every 15 minutes, the farm’s robots, soil sensors, weather stations, and smart cameras beam data on temperature, humidity, light, and soil fertility back to the “farm brain,” completing a digital snapshot of the entire field.
At XAG’s Super Farm, the “unmanned farm” is already a reality. During the recent “Vibrant China Research Tour” in Guangdong, Gong Jiaoqin, co-founder and senior vice president of XAG, told NUPIAO and other media that the company’s smart agricultural robots have now entered over 70 countries and regions. XAG’s sales volume ranks second globally in both the agricultural robot and agricultural drone industries. Over the past few years, the fleet has covered 2.8 billion mu of farmland operations, and the number of farms running XAG equipment has reached 5,200.
Behind those numbers lies a much more urgent global question: who will actually farm the land?
An aging workforce is the common headache for agriculture everywhere—the average age of farmers in China has hit 53, in the United States it’s 58.1, and in Japan it’s creeping close to 65.
Looking at the domestic market, agricultural drones have already passed the initial adoption stage, but the penetration rate is still low. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs’ statistics earlier this year, China has more than 300,000 agricultural drones in service, ranking first globally in both application volume and scale, with annual operations covering over 460 million mu of farmland and surpassing 3 billion mu in total sorties. Yet measured against the country’s 2 billion mu of arable land, the current penetration rate is still modest, which means the growth runway is enormous.
In Gong Jiaoqin’s view, one reason the penetration rate remains low is that traditional farm machinery covers surprisingly little ground. On the front line of field production, large machinery can only handle a handful of standardized tasks, while the vast majority of specialized farm operations still lean heavily on manual labor—especially crop protection spraying, fertilizer topdressing, and other field management chores where human dependence is the most stubborn.
“Although the mechanization rate in China’s field management has already broken through 10%, more than 70% of the time and cost across the whole production cycle still relies on human input. The direction we’re heading is for robots to fully participate in the entire agricultural production process, pushing field operations to reach automation levels comparable to what we see today in homes and factories,” Gong noted.
Starting out as an agricultural drone company, XAG has gradually expanded its business footprint to cover unmanned farm vehicles, smart farm management systems, and autopilot kits for tractors, touching more and more links in the agricultural chain.
Qian Shuting, head of public affairs at XAG, explained to NUPIAO that the company’s products now cover the four critical field operations of “water, fertilizer, pesticide, and patrol,” and are suitable for paddy fields, dry land, greenhouses, and orchards—effectively filling the widening labor gap driven by global aging and shrinking populations.
“A single drone can manage 500 mu of farmland and achieve a fully unmanned planting cycle. These devices are already completely autonomous. The system cuts water and electricity costs per mu of rice by 47%, reduces pesticide use by 30%, and boosts fertilizer utilization by 40%. Right now, we’ve brought the price of an agricultural drone down to under 50,000 RMB. For a drone operator or a farmer, that price means you could recoup your investment in the same year,” Gong said.
Higher volumes of end products are directly pulling up the business numbers. Data shows that from 2023 to 2025, XAG’s revenue grew from 615 million yuan to 1.166 billion yuan, and its gross margin climbed from 18.9% in 2023 to 35.7% in 2025. The company attributes the profit improvement mainly to technological innovations that cut hardware costs, along with a rising share of higher-margin overseas sales.
Gong recalled that when they started going global in 2017, American farmers were mostly using manned fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters, covering thousands of mu in a single pass. Back then, an XAG drone could only manage about 20 mu per flight, which gave it zero advantage overseas. Now the company’s drones have a payload topping 85 kilograms. While manned aircraft still carry 400-500 kilograms, the purchase cost of a drone is just 1% of that of a manned plane, making the cost-effectiveness impossible to ignore.
That efficiency advantage is even reshaping farmers’ habits. “Farmers in places like the US and Xinjiang, China, are changing the shape of their fields to match how drones operate. They used to talk about ‘how many rows they planted.’ Now they talk about ‘how many flight lines’ they’ve planted. Even if it means sacrificing some patches of land, they’d much rather use drones to do the work,” Gong remarked.
The leap in product performance is rooted in AI technology going “down to the field.” Chen Yousheng, vice president of XAG’s smart platform, told NUPIAO that a single agricultural drone can finish seeding 180 mu of land in half a day. The entire workflow now follows a standard smart control logic: farmers first mark out field boundaries and set flight parameters on a high-precision map, then AI automatically calculates the optimal operation path, and the drone executes the entire mission on its own. For crop protection, “AI prescription maps” have completely rewritten the traditional spraying logic, upgrading uniform blanket spraying to variable-rate precision application that dramatically cuts pesticide waste.
“Patrol drones, smart field valves, and intelligent water-fertilizer management systems can each replace manual labor for their corresponding tasks. The underlying AI algorithms continuously interpret field data and deliver quantitative decision support for core farming operations like irrigation, fertilization, and pesticide application,” Chen explained. For example, the water-fertilizer management system can achieve timed, quantified precision feeding; in water-saving scenarios, a single smart irrigation valve can replace manual control of 10 mu of farmland, and farmers can remotely fine-tune it through a mobile APP without having to trek back and forth to turn valves on and off by hand.
But it’s worth noting that earlier agricultural drones still weren’t fully free of manual assistance. They were essentially semi-autonomous tools, with autonomy limited to takeoff, landing, flight, and spraying, while high-frequency auxiliary tasks like recharging, mixing chemicals, refilling, and cleaning still required repetitive human labor—the core bottleneck holding back true unmanned operation.
To tackle this industry pain point, on July 6, XAG launched its new generation of aerial and ground-based agricultural robots: the X series agricultural robots and the RM80 unmanned lawn mower. Among them, the X series agricultural robot debuts a fully automated process for crop protection operations with agricultural drones.
The system consists of three core pieces of equipment: the X series agricultural drone, the XA1 agricultural drone port, and the LM1 smart mixing and refilling station. Together, they can automatically handle route planning, aerial spraying, liquid mixing and refilling, recharging, and cleaning maintenance—the whole nine yards.
Specs that usually show up at smartphone launch events are now being packed into farm drones. XAG founder Peng Bin introduced that the X series controller is built on an 8nm process, armed with an 8-core CPU and 6T of AI computing power. In plain language, that means overall performance is double that of the previous generation.
Behind this rapid iteration, the mature manufacturing cluster of the Pearl River Delta provides the core backbone. Data shows that “Made in Guangdong” agricultural robots account for nearly half of the global market, and agricultural drones grab over 70% of the share.
Gong Jiaoqin noted that the traditional manufacturing strengths of the Pearl River Delta are a huge advantage: the supply chain the company needs can basically be covered within a one-hour drive. Combine that with strong policy support in recent years for emerging sectors like autonomous driving and robotics, and thanks to the cluster effect, advances in core components like chips, motors, and batteries will keep pushing hardware costs further down.
One clear result of that is the breakthrough in battery performance unveiled at this launch. The XAG B18630 smart flash-charging battery slashes the charging time for an agricultural drone from 60 minutes a decade ago to just 2.5 to 3.5 minutes.
Peng Bin admitted that battery cost was once the biggest factor holding back the spread of agricultural drones. In the early days, a single P20 set cost up to 200,000 RMB, and battery cost accounted for more than half of that. Each drone needed 6 to 8—sometimes even a dozen—battery packs just to get through a day’s work. As the technology evolved, newer models can get by with just two battery packs for daily operations. The newly launched B18630 flash-charging battery is made of 18 cells in series, with a 12.5C charge rate and a 17.5C discharge rate, making it the fastest-charging and highest-discharge-rate battery purpose-built for agricultural drones in the industry today.
