29 October, GUANGZHOU – XAG Annual Conference 2019 (XAAC), themed ‘Empowering the Next-Gen Farmers’, was hosted on 28 October in Guangzhou, China. It brought together 1300 people, including XAG’s strategic partners, solution providers, agricultural experts and renowned media from 30 countries, for interdisciplinary collaboration. XAG, the world’s leading agriculture technology company and industrial UAS manufacturer, announced the all-new XPlanet® Agricultural UAS at the conference, once again setting new standards for drone technology and redefining the future of agricultural production. 

Justin Gong, Co-founder and Vice President of XAG kicked off the conference by presenting the rapid development of China’s agricultural drone industry and the significant role that XAG plays in it. During the past three years, XAG’s UAS crop protection services have covered 20 million hectares of global farmlands. The market penetration rate has been exponentially growing in China’s 29 provinces.

XAG has also introduced its crop spraying drones into 38 countries and collaborated with local business partners to promote precision agriculture technology. At the conference, Dr John H Troughton, Global Consultant of Agriculture, Ecology and Energy Programs, the United Nations, shared how Australian farmers use XAG’s mapping and spraying drone to control harmful weeds and increase protein production. Fraser Zhang, CEO of Sunagri Zambia Ltd., talked about the experience of XAG combating fall armyworm to safeguard maize in Africa. Lim Dae Man, CEO of Korea Agricultural Technology Holdings Co., Ltd., explained how XAG’s drone are innovatively applied to golf course weeding and forest protection.

The Ultimate Agricultural Drone, Fast & Precise Delivering

“Agricultural UAS needs to be more adaptive to user demands and market changes, ” said Peng Bin, CEO and Founder of XAG, at the much-anticipated product release. As increasingly adopted by more users either on large farms, small fields or rugged orchards, agricultural drone should no longer be limited to crop spraying and instead, should improve its usability, versatility and cost-efficiency to accommodate the regional and seasonal differences of agricultural production.

Yearly changes of XAG drone service coverage in China's Xinjiang and Heilongjiang Province 

The all-new XAG® XPlanet® Agricultural UAS is a high-performance unmanned aerial system that combines atomisation spraying and intelligent spreading technology to provide every user with smart agriculture solution on unlimited application scenarios (e.g., crop spraying, rice direct seeding, rapeseed spreading, grassland restoration, forest protection and crayfish feeding). Designed to improve yield and food quality with 90% less water and 30% less chemical, it is the world’s first fully integrated agricultural drone that pushes spraying efficiency to an unprecedented level of 18 hectares per hour. When mounted with JetSeed™ Granule Spreading System, XAG® XPlanet® can precisely spread rice seeds, through 18m/s high-speed airflow, on 6.5 hectares of land per hour, 80 times more efficient than manual seeding.

XAG® XPlanet® Agricultural UAS adopts the highly efficient, stable quadrotor design, compatible with various operating modules of different functions and capacities while elevating its maximum payload to an impressive 20kg. The ground-breaking 4D Imaging Radar provides XAG XPlanet® with impressive ability of environment sensing and automatic obstacle avoidance. Simply via a smartphone or button-based manual control stick, XAG XPlanet® Agricultural UAS can autonomously conduct seeding, fertilisation, chemical spraying and feeding at centimetre-level high accuracy on various terrains, no matter plain fields, hills, mountains, terraces and plateau.

Besides the new product launch event, XAG Annual Conference also invited distinguished agricultural experts, business leaders and government officials to converge collective wisdom for a sustainable farming future. In the expert panel China’s Standpoints of Agriculture, experienced agronomists have proposed the major challenges that agricultural mechanisation are facing, such as the unavailability of automated technology for high-value crops. In the panel discussion From Sustainable Farm to Tomorrow’s Table: How will Technology Shape the Future of Agriculture, consensus have been reached on harnessing drone, AI and big data to reconcile the controversy between food safety and climate change.

As Zhang Shixian, Professor of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in his keynote speech Chinese Agriculture: Dilemma, Challenges and Solution, “digital technologies are fundamentally revolutionising traditional agriculture. And XAG is the game-changer of this crucial battle.”