Agri sector reaps fruit of tech advances

China's push for agricultural modernization reached a new milestone last year, with scientific and technological advancements contributing more than 64 percent to the sector's growth, officials said on Thursday.

Their remarks highlight China's accelerating shift from traditional, labor-intensive farming practices to a model driven by automation, biotechnology and data analytics.

Addressing a news conference, Vice-Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Zhang Xingwang said the integration of modern technology into agriculture is becoming increasingly widespread, marking a significant move from conventional farming methods to high-tech ones.

One of the cornerstones of China's modernization efforts is the development of high-standard farmland equipped with modern irrigation and drainage systems to ensure stable yields, Zhang said.

China supported the establishment and upgrading of 5.06 million hectares of high-standard farmland in 2025, bringing the cumulative total to more than 66.7 million hectares nationwide, he added.

Significant progress has also been made in the seed industry, with seeds regarded as the "microchips" of agriculture.

"In particular, the market share of domestically developed vegetable seeds has risen rapidly in recent years, including for varieties such as broccoli, in which China previously lagged in terms of yield capacity," Zhang said.

According to the ministry, domestic varieties now account for more than 80 percent of the market for livestock and poultry breeding.

The figure is higher for other categories, reaching 86 percent for aquatic products and 91 percent for vegetables.

Zhou Yunlong, head of the ministry's department of science, technology and education, said that last year, the country achieved major breakthroughs in basic research and frontier technology.

Yangmai 53, a new wheat variety, has been designed to address the trade-off between disease resistance — specifically against head blight — and high yield, he said.

Zhou also highlighted the cloning of the world's first heat-tolerance gene in rice — a discovery that offers a new solution for maintaining agricultural yields amid rising global temperatures.

The research was mentioned among the top 10 global scientific breakthroughs of 2025 by the journal Science.

Meanwhile, mechanization rates continued to climb in 2025, with the comprehensive mechanization rate for crop cultivation, planting and harvesting reaching 76.7 percent.

"The lack of suitable machinery or poor machine performance in hilly and mountainous areas has been effectively addressed," Zhou said.

He noted that the research in agricultural robots is also accelerating, and China now has more than 300,000 agricultural drones in operation.

These devices, used for tasks ranging from precision pesticide spraying to crop monitoring, cover more than 30.7 million hectares of farmland annually, he said.

Officials said that this year, the focus will remain on achieving high-level self-reliance in agricultural science and technology.

The ministry plans to promote the application of artificial intelligence in agriculture, expanding scenarios for drones, the internet of things and robots to make production more precise and efficient.

It will also ramp up efforts to tackle bottlenecks in seed breeding, high-end machinery use and smart agriculture.

Zhou said a major shift involves moving innovation out of universities and into the commercial sector, adding that the ministry will strengthen the role of agricultural enterprises as the primary driver of innovation.

Furthermore, the ministry will nurture agricultural technology companies and form innovation consortiums led by enterprises to bridge the gap between research and commercial application, he said.