AI from China Benefits the World | "Smart Courtyards" Breathe New Life into Brazilian Family Farms

Internet-of-Things monitoring terminals are set up at the Science and Technology Courtyard in Brasilia.

The smart farm management platform in use in Brazil.

On the FAL family farm in the countryside of Brasilia, the capital city of Brazil, neatly arranged ridges stretched across the fields. Inside a row of white buildings not far away, Professor Sérgio Sauer, head of the China-Brazil Technology Courtyard program on the Brazilian side, was watching a large screen on the wall flickered with all kinds of data and a soil-moisture map.

When Sauer noticed that the moisture level in a plot in the northwest corner was about to fall below the warning line, he quickly dragged his mouse to mark out the irrigation zone, set the irrigation time to 25 minutes, and tapped the "Start" button. Almost instantly, the solenoid valves on the irrigation equipment in fields over several kilometers away switched on automatically, and water was then sprayed across the wheat field. This is just a snapshot of the daily routine at the smart agricultural program Science and Technology Courtyard jointly built by China and Brazil.

"AI + Agriculture": Small Farms Getting Smart

Brazil's family farms are concentrated mainly in the northern part, where the majority of family farmers still rely on oxen, donkeys and manual labor, resulting in a relatively low level of mechanization in family farming. The weak digital foundation of agricultural production has become a bottleneck for nearly 5 million Brazilian family farmers seeking to improve their livelihoods.

Around 2020, some Brazilian family farms began to come to China looking for solutions that could boost production efficiency. In early 2024, SINOMACH Digital Technology Corporation sent a specialized research team to Brazil. The team conducted in-depth surveys of local planting patterns and infrastructure conditions of major agricultural regions and family farms, pinpointing the core needs of family agriculture's transformation and establishing a standing communication and coordination mechanism linking government, business and academia.

In November 2024, witnessed by China's Ministry of Education, Brazil's Ministry of Agrarian Development and Family Agriculture and other government bodies, the Brazil-China Center for Family Farming was officially inaugurated. The program was established by SINOMACH Digital Technology Corporation, China Agricultural University and the University of Brasilia, with sites located in Brasilia and Apodi.

Relying on the Science and Technology Courtyard, researchers from universities and enterprises in China and Brazil took the lead in developing and applying a smart farm management platform for sample farms in Brazil. Internet-of-Things sensors have been installed in the fields to monitor temperature, humidity and whether there are pests on the leaves in real time, while smart farm machinery can sense various soil indicators when it is operating in the fields. The data is transmitted via BeiDou base stations set up around the plots and fed into the Smart Farm Management Platform on farm managers' devices, bringing the entire process from planting, field management and work scheduling to harvesting under intelligent control. With a few light clicks on a phone or computer screen, farm managers can complete the planting, management and harvesting of the fields, just like playing a mobile game.

The Brazil-China Center for Family Farming in Brasilia.

"Smart Courtyards" Boost Sustainable Agricultural Development

Researchers from China and Brazil have capitalized on the Science and Technology Courtyard to build a smart farm management mode. By collecting data on soil moisture, crop growth, pests and diseases, and disaster conditions, they have built models tailored to local conditions for crop growth, pest and disease control, as well as local weather and soil analysis, generating customized planting plans for family farms and cutting the cost of farm inputs and labor by 8% to 12%. With the entire crop growth cycle under management, crops such as corn and sugarcane have shown markedly better growth, raising the average yield per mu by 6% to 10%.

With the Science and Technology Courtyard at its core, agricultural cooperation between China and Brazil has gradually expanded from single-point technology demonstrations to collaboration across the entire industry chain. In 2025, smart agriculture cooperation between the two countries expanded further, with several agricultural machinery companies from both sides reaching agreements of intent to jointly build machinery assembly plants and set up regional, integrated smart agriculture service centers, among other projects. A full agricultural industry chain combining equipment manufacturing, cross-border supply, and digital operation and maintenance is gradually taking shape.

The full-process digital management supported by the Science and Technology Courtyard program has seen improvement in the precision and utilization rate of farm machinery operations. Edmilson Xavier da Costa Filho, a major rice grower in Apodi, farms 5 hectares of rice with his family of three. Before the Science and Technology Courtyard was established in Apodi, his family relied almost entirely on animal and human labor. Just preparing the land before sowing took the whole family about four days of work. Now, using a digitally controlled rotary tiller driven by a tractor with triangular crawler tracks tailored for him by the Science and Technology Courtyard, he can get the job done in a single morning.

Zhou Hui, a graduate student from the College of Engineering at China Agricultural University, recalled: "We once worked with a Brazilian farmer who had lost an arm in an accident, and customized a harvester for him. Now he operates it more skillfully and becomes something of a celebrity in the village, known as the 'Chinese machine operator'".

Vinicius Claudino de Sá, a professor at the State University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, said the Science and Technology Courtyard is helping Brazil build up a pool of homegrown technical talents with global vision who can genuinely serve family farms.

Today, smart farm demonstration zones have been established on the FAL farm (over 400 hectares) in Brasilia, the Apodi farm (over 200 hectares) in Rio Grande do Norte state, and more than 130 hectares of farmland in the city of Londrina in Paraná state. Data showed that in large-scale corn farming in Brazil, the technology and equipment solutions provided by the Chinese team could boost corn production efficiency by nearly 200%.

This paradigm of cooperation on smart agriculture is not only developing rapidly in Brazil but also spreading to other countries such as Thailand and Belarus. With cooperation as the bond, it is bringing the benefits of AI technology to more countries, consistently empowering the global cause of poverty alleviation, food security and sustainable development. (Shao Li)