The world’s first unmanned ratoon rice farm has entered the harvest season in Datonghu District, Yiyang, central China’s Hunan Province, with two autonomous harvesters cutting and threshing independently. This smart farming model was showcased at the FAO 2026 Global Smart Agriculture Conference in Rome and selected as a flagship smart agriculture case in the Asia-Pacific region.

Ratoon rice yields two harvests from a single planting: the stubble regrows after the first harvest to produce a second crop months later, reducing water, fertilizer, seed and labor inputs.

The farm integrates BeiDou navigation-enabled machinery with a digital control platform to achieve fully unmanned production from tillage to drying. The 200-hectare site requires only four maintenance staff, with an operating accuracy of 2.5 cm. The technology also cuts the stubble crushing rate from 40% to below 10%, boosting yields.

Now scaled from trials to full production, the model cuts labor costs and improves efficiency, transforming experience-based farming into data-driven precision agriculture.