XAG Urged Rural Development to Go Green at Fortune's Global Sustainability Forum

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Sep 10, 2019, 06:04 ET

YUXI, China, Sept. 10, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- XAG has been invited to attend the inaugural Fortune Global Sustainability Forum, held from September 4-6 in China's Yunnan Province, to explore cutting-edge thinking and innovative solutions for the growing environmental problems. This three-day summit has convened senior leaders from Fortune 500 companies, government, NGOs, academia and other pioneering business to forge new environmental consensus through the convergence of energy, technology and sustainability.

Guest speakers included Tony Fadell, Principal of Future Shape, Pat Brown, Founder and CEO of Impossible Foods Inc, Jim Fitterling, CEO of Dow Chemical, Clay Chandler, Executive Director and Asia Editor of Fortune, Cristiana Paşca Palmer, Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, etc.

As a representative of agriculture technology company and the only drone maker at this year's forum, XAG, together with Nature Conservancy, CreditEase, WildChina and Yunnan Poverty Alleviation Office, presented key insights that falls under the sub-theme Rural Development and the Environment.

Speaking at the forum, Justin Gong, Co-founder and Vice President of XAG, has informed the world of an upcoming paradigm shift in agriculture. The smart farming revolution is empowered by the game-changing technologies that play a pivotal role in alleviating poverty and boosting rural development without further destruction on the planet.

During the past five years, XAG has actively engaged in Chinese rural development through empowering smallholders with advanced technology that was once beyond reach. In collaborative efforts, the company has established digital agriculture infrastructure that covers China's main rural areas and developed automated smart devices, such as drones, intelligent sensors, robots and artificial intelligence, to elevate agricultural productivity. Also, precision spraying technology is helping farmers grow high-quality produce with reduced use of pesticide and agricultural water.

Justin Gong believed that China is about to embrace an unprecedented paradigm shift in digital agriculture. "Smallholders will play a leading role in this technological revolution. With increasing adoption of new farming tools, they are unleashing huge productivity and agility to the ever-evolving consumer market," he said.

While automation and precision agriculture technology are helping smallholders achieve competitive advantages through improved quality and lowered production cost, the convergence of new finance and digital technology would further increase farmers' purchasing power. Specifically, when the agriculture production process is digitalised to enable a transparent, traceable food value chain, the finest producers can obtain timely positive feedbacks from the market and hence charge a premium price.

Having served 4.7 million farmers with UAS crop protection services on over 8 million hectares of farmlands, XAG has accumulated a massive amount of agricultural production data, such as the type of pesticides used, spraying volume, crop growth, soil condition and weather, that is being used to enable scientific farm management and close the yield gap.

From Justin Gong's perspective, the rest of the world should keep up with the changes happening in China's rural community. "The upcoming paradigm shift will not only transform Chinese rural economy but also disrupt the global agricultural trade pattern," he said. Growing more with less through the application of smart technology, precision agriculture would substantially cut down carbon emissions and shrink ecological footprints. Meantime, the tech-powered smallholder economy, compared to scale farming, can better safeguard the earth's biodiversity and create a climate-resilient future for sustainable rural development.

Founded in 2007, XAG is a Chinese-based smart agriculture technology company and one of the world's largest agriculture UAS manufacturers. It has developed fully autonomous drone, agriculture intelligence and Internet-of-Thing system that aim to transform the current farming methods into highly productive, environmentally sustainable practices.

For more speaker highlights of the forum, please see the link: https://www.xa.com/en/news/official/xag/58

SOURCE XAG