Over the past two decades, China’s agricultural workforce has more than halved, leaving largely the elderly, the infirm and the disabled to tend vast expanses of farmland, operating small-scale plots with relatively low efficiency.

While Chinese agricultural machinery does not rank globally, the shift to embodied intelligence amid the current tech revolution may reshape this status quo, said Zhao Feng, founder of Shenzhen-based robotics firm GrainCore Dynamics.

With its artificial intelligence capabilities and strength in mass production, Zhao said, China was well-positioned to overtake in agricultural robotics – in similar fashion to its rapid progress in new energy and electric vehicles (EVs) after lagging behind in combustion-engine cars.

Chinese agriculture “may appear to have a serious ageing problem, but within this crisis lies opportunity”, Zhao said, noting that globally, only China possessed both the AI technology and the manufacturing capacity for robotics production at scale.

“Think of it like the early days of Chinese carmakers trying to catch up with BMW and Mercedes – after 30 years we still hadn’t closed the gap on their century-old technological edge,” he said. “But then new energy vehicles gave us a short cut and we leapfrogged them in just 10 years.”

GrainCore Dynamics is among China’s first companies focusing on integrating embodied intelligence into agriculture.