?°Farming technology and the associated demonstration?± is a project under the modern farming component of the national 863 program initiated by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology for the tenth five-year period. The project constitutes a preliminary framework for digital farming, or a technology platform for the purpose. Incomplete statistics show that the project has worked out 3 draft technical standards for digital farming, and applied for 42 patents, of which 17 are for invention patent, with 2 grants. In addition, researchers under the project have filed 53 registrations for software copyrights, and rolled out 38 digital farming products of promising market perspectives. The project produced 101 post-graduates, and published 182 papers, of which 26 were collected by SCI or EI. The project also resulted in 9 monographs, and established 26 bases for innovative technologies demonstration and product applications. The new technologies and products have been diffused to an area over 100,000 mu(1mu=0.0667 ha.).

In the area of key digital farming technologies and products, substantial progresses have been achieved in the following aspects: farming information collecting technology, low-cost and high performance products, digital designs for corn and paddy rice strain structures, advanced technical means for breeding super-yield strains and efficient utilization of resources, establishing climate-soil-crop models for wheat, rice, corn, and cotton, and establishing a mathematics and knowledge model based digital crop design system. 

Digital farming technology integration and platform construction applaud for the following accomplishment: a preliminary farming technology platform integrated with both software and hardware, which runs information collection, information processing, and accurate implementation on an operational basis; a preliminary technology platform for digital stock and poultry breeding, which offers a high-tech support for modern breeding industry and raises the management level of large breeding farms; a public technical platform for digital forestry, with data collection standards for digital forestry; and structure designs for digital forestry platform and associated technical standards.

In the area of digital farming applications and demonstrations, application and demonstration bases have been established in Shanghai Pudong, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Xinjiang, and Beijing Xiaotangshan, in an effort to show the merits of digital farming technology, digital field crop technology, and digital conventional farming technology. In the demonstration zones, crop yields enjoy an increase from 15% to 20%, with an enhanced economic return by 10%, a lowered production cost at 10%, raised production efficiency of 20%, and an ascending economic return of 18% for the breeding industry.