From weeding and vegetable growing to the overall management of agricultural systems, AI has been widely adopted across all aspects of agriculture.

Weeds are a major thorn in the side of farmers and the entire agricultural production process. To address this, a research team from Nanjing Forestry University developed an intelligent tech platform, effectively and accurately controls the weeds in rice and wheat fields.

The platform can remotely monitor the dynamic reduction of weeds in a quantitative manner with the help of big data and AI, and make accurate decisions of applying chemical herbicide, growing the yield by 10 percent on average and cutting weeding costs by over 40 percent.

To help farmers better control weeds, the research team has also developed an App. Farmers can upload pictures of their crop fields at key growth stages to the App, which uses a big data prediction model and AI image detection to analyze weed conditions. Based on the analyses, the App's AI decision-making function will provide accurate weeding recommendations and guidance to farmers.

The efficiency of sowing, planting, harvesting and washing of vegetables has also been greatly elevated by AI in a smart plant factory in eastern China's coastal province of Shandong.

The high-precision automatic sowing machine can accurately land a vegetable seed as small as sesame on the seedling sponge. Rail guided vehicles deliver the planting plates to the automatic stacker and clean the nutrient solution basin in passing.

Once the planting plates are moved to the sorting area by the conveyor belt, the AI platform will conduct image recognition and analysis in real time. It can identify the yellow leaves on the young plants, enabling mechanical arms to quickly locate and remove these leaves. The machine's accuracy in automatic screening and classification of seedlings reaches as high as 98 percent.

Meanwhile, in the management of agricultural production scenarios, an intelligent platform called "Nongbozhiwen" has proven its strength. The platform was developed by an agriculture AI laboratory jointly established by Southern Finance Omnimedia Corp., China Telecom Guangdong, and Guangdong Mancloud IoT Technology Co., Ltd.

Based on the support of financial data, communications technologies, Internet of Things (IoT) and AI, the platform can realize the smart collection and analysis of agricultural data, and offer precise solutions to different agricultural scenarios, covering multiple phases of agricultural production.

Whether it's fertilization and pesticide control, or responding to climate change, the platform can provide farmers and enterprises with efficient management tools.

The platform is now able to offer customized and smart management schemes for more than 10 species, including rice. By monitoring the growing environment of crops in real time via IoT equipment, the platform can generate the best management strategies using AI algorithms, thus helping farmers cut resource waste and enhance production efficiency.