XAG

Founded in 2007, XAG is a world-leading smart agriculture technology company, dedicated to using robotics and AI to empower agriculture, helping farmers grow more with less.

Co-founder and Senior Vice President Justin Gong explains how the company became a leader in smart agriculture and how AI can deliver a future for farming that is more environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable.

What was the vision behind XAG?

Peng Bin and I grew up as radio-controlled (RC) aviation model enthusiasts. We named our company “XAircraft”, with the “X” symbolizing the X-shaped quadcopters we built when we started in 2007. That same year, Apple introduced the iPhone, and the large-scale production of smart phones made components like micro-CPU, IMU, camera, and lithium batteries more accessible. This allowed us to incorporate similar technologies into commercial drones, laying the foundation for our business.

As we dived into agricultural drones and robots, we changed “XAircraft” to “XAG” representing the future of agriculture, while “X” evolved to signify our commitment to pushing boundaries and exploring new frontiers.

We were exploring various uses for our drones, until a friend invited us to his hometown in northwest China in 2013, we decided to shift our focus to agriculture.

The region is the world’s top cotton producer, but at that time, all the cotton was still picked by hand, and the farmers were trying to introduce mechanical cotton harvesters for the first time. To use a harvester, they need to spray a chemical defoliant which helps the cotton ball open up and fully mature. It’s really difficult to get in between the plants and if you used a tractor, you would end up crushing the crop and lose about 10% of the yield.

In the United States, farmers were using manned aircraft, but in China, those capabilities didn’t exist, and we discovered that drones are a really efficient way to spray the crops. In China alone, there are more than three million hectares of cotton farmland, so we started developing our drones for agriculture.

What other agricultural uses did you discover for your drones?

When we looked at arable farming, we found great variation in the level of mechanization at different stages of a crop’s lifetime. Cultivation activities like tilling and seeding were almost 100% mechanized —everyone used tractors. Harvest time was also heavily mechanized — in China it was about 85% by machines.

But in between is a period which is called plant protection or food management, which accounts for about 80% of the time and 70% of the total input — and mostly reliant on human labor. That's why we thought we could bring more technology into that period to make agriculture more productive and efficient. We started developing not only drones but also unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), IoT sensors, and farm management software, and now we are working on self-driving tractors.

Where does AI fit into the picture?

Farmers had invested in mechanizing the key moments of their planting and harvesting but the longer in-between part was still dependent on human labor. Those mechanized parts are quite simple when you think about them — harvesting is slightly more difficult but it’s still a mechanical process that doesn’t require much thinking. Taking care of the plants, however, represents a whole other level of complexity. You have to make decisions. You have to perceive the environment, the climate, the soil, the moisture level, the accumulation of heat — everything. And you have to be able to respond to changes in the weather, crop diseases, insects, etc. That's why people couldn’t use many tools and relied on human knowledge and judgement.

In the U.S. or in big farms in Brazil or in Germany where they only grow one crop, they can spray herbicide to kill everything except the crop and they can use big machines to manage and control the growing environment. But most farmers — in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa — are smallholders. They are growing multiple crops on the same land, planted at different times. Taking care of those plants is time-consuming and labor-consuming and that's where XAG can help.

We built our business on designing not big single-purpose machines but smarter, smaller, more flexible tools for smallholder farmers. All our drones are fully autonomous with centimeter-level accuracy, real-time maneuverability, a 40-millimeter wave radar, a camera on top — compact and combined microsensors, powerful chips, IoT, and robotic technologies.

All this is coordinated through AI to deliver intelligent, autonomous solutions that can understand and make decisions in multiple changing situations. The AI is able to supplement the knowledge of the farmers that has been passed down through generations.

What is the unifying idea that underpins all your products and services?

What holds our product lines together, including hardware and software, is data.

We always say that the drone is the key that opens up smart agriculture for the farmer. To make our drone fly on your farm, you need a high-definition map of the fields.

Our cities are mapped with known distances and predictable route timings that enable food delivery and taxis and so many other services that we take for granted. On the farm, there is no base map to begin with, so we developed a drone-based mapping system that provides a navigation network for any kind of vehicle to run autonomously and precisely — in the air or on the ground. This map provides the first, foundation-level dataset of the farm.
And then, because all these products are running in the field, they are generating all sorts of data. Today that data is stored in their local server, but in the future, we believe this data can be of huge value to the farmer.

Imagine, for example, in the supply chain, how this data can help supermarkets to know their farmers and their inputs and behaviors and everything that has gone into the making of their product. The data can be used to encourage good farming practices.

Think as well about the insurance company so they can better identify problems and calculate loss. And the banks so they can offer better loans to farmers. I believe that everything holding this together is the data.

What is your vision for the future of farming?

The future for us is to use AI to advance agriculture. That means not just increasing productivity but putting in place a whole new ecosystem.

Today, even though we have many machines and tools — airplanes and drones in the sky and robots in the field — most agricultural production is operated by human beings. And the knowledge required to be a farmer is still mainly what has been handed down relatively unchanged from one generation to the next.

But that’s rapidly changing as the environment is changing. I believe that most farmers now believe in climate change, whereas five years ago they didn’t. The traditional knowledge of farming needs to change to keep up, and the thinking behind all the tools and the methodology of farming needs to change as well. That’s where AI can develop new ways to understand and manage farms in changing circumstances.

The other thing is that even though we still have a growing population worldwide, in many countries there are fewer and fewer next generation farmers. Farmers and their families are moving to the city and fewer people want to do anything in the field. They want to own the farm but not have to farm it. That's where robotics and AI can help.

And thirdly, there’s the question of how we integrate agriculture within the ecosystem. Environmentally, since the Industrial Revolution, many or most species on planet have been killed by human activity, including farming. And over the last two decades, we have seen a big decrease in biodiversity including, for example, bee and butterfly populations.

This is also the time where we can alter this reality by using much smaller acreage to produce enough food for our current and future generations while providing greater biodiversity through our use of the land.

For us, this is the future of farming. Integrating technology and AI to make our agriculture more sustainable, more autonomous, and more efficient so farmers and their families can continue to live on the land, and we all have enough food to eat.