Today marks the ninth Chinese Farmers' Harvest Festival. This celebration also serves as a moment of reflection: among the many factors that ensure food security, the role of technology is becoming increasingly prominent.

During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the contribution rate of agricultural scientific and technological progress in China rose from 61.5% in 2021 to over 64% in 2025. This is not an isolated statistic; it reflects the widespread adoption of improved seed varieties, soil testing and formula fertilization, and intelligent agricultural machinery across farmland. The dilemma of "no machines available" or "machines that are hard to use" in hilly and mountainous areas has been alleviated. Independently developed white-feathered broiler chickens and Huaxi cattle have broken foreign monopolies. Over the past five years, agricultural technology development has advanced steadily, providing a technological safety net for the food supply of over 1.4 billion people.

However, the achievements also reveal shortcomings that cannot be ignored. At the front end, insufficient interdisciplinary integration has led to weak original innovation, and the issue of "bottleneck" constraints on certain high-end seed sources remains a reality. At the back end, agricultural technology deployment lacks supporting systems, and the rate of technology commercialization still trails that of some developed countries by a considerable margin. At the application level, the current technology supply generally operates in a "single-point" mode: having a good seed does not guarantee matching water and fertilizer management, and introducing intelligent farm machinery often fails to integrate with traditional agronomic practices. The front end lacks integration, and the back end lacks support; in essence, agricultural technology still works in isolation, without sufficient synergy.

In May this year, the State Council issued the "15th Five-Year Plan for Accelerating Agricultural and Rural Modernization," setting a target of 67% for the contribution rate of agricultural scientific and technological progress by 2030. Industry experts believe that at the stage of 50% to 60%, the diffusion of individual technologies can indeed drive growth. However, climbing from the current high level of 64%, the room for growth through the diffusion of individual technologies has clearly narrowed. The 3-percentage-point increase from 64% to 67% may seem modest, but it imposes new requirements on the approach to agricultural technology: shifting from the "single trick" of individual technologies to a "combined strategy" of cross-disciplinary technological integration.

AI-driven breeding, RNA-based biopesticide manufacturing, agricultural low-altitude economy, and synthetic immunity—these frontier technologies serve as the focus of efforts to break free from single-point dependence and achieve integrated breakthroughs. AI-driven breeding, for example, goes beyond cultivating a superior seed; it connects genetic, phenotypic, and field data, moving seed promotion from "experience-based selection" to "precise matching." Similarly, in the agricultural low-altitude economy, drones must not only fly but also exchange data with ground machinery and field sensors, forming a precise, coordinated ground-air operation network.