Meet XAG’s new headquarter campus “XSpace” – an inclusive, nature-inspired workspace located in Tianhe Software Park, one of China’s first national high-tech industrial development zones. Completed in 2018, the 108,000-square-foot office is surrounded by natural landscape such as woods and lakes and now houses nearly 500 employees from R&D, marketing, sales and other supporting departments.  As an agriculture technology company, we aim to resolve the world’s most challenging problems related to sustainable sustenance. High tech such as agriculture drones, AI engine and IoT system have been leveraged to enable smart farming and improve food safety. Such core values are deeply embedded in XSpace’s design principle – achieving a symbiosis between technology and nature. At the entrance of XSpace is a greeting wall with an XAG logo grown from Australian bryophyte, which brings natural vitality at the very moment of stepping in. Situated right behind the reception, a mini ecological indoor farm tended by internal staff is built alongside the exhibition hall to display how intelligent devices are being applied to enable precision agriculture and grow high-quality produce. Exploring deeper, it can be discovered that earth friendly elements are everywhere inside the building, with eco-cement, timber and other renewable materials being used for interior design. The 4-story, open-plan layout and the relaxing communal spaces on each floor are designed to inspire collaboration and creativity to the greatest extent. This all makes XSpace the hub of agtech innovation emerging from engineers’ rigorous yet out-of-the-box thinking. In addition, a series of modern amenities, including a café, a boutique gym and a rooftop garden, has been unsurprisingly introduced to the building, as employee perks and important part of what our company represents. The Tech-backed, Ecological Exhibition Space The most distinguished feature of XSpace, without doubt, is the exhibition space that vividly tells stories on how agriculture has been consistently reshaped by the ever-evolving technology. The most advanced smart agriculture devices, including all series of the red-and-white plant protection drones, are neatly presented in an open area, with a big screen showing abundant agricultural production data born from lands. The number of farmers served, hectares of farmlands protected, hours of safe flight, amount of pesticide saved etc. – each of these statistics indicates our engineers’ relentless pursuit for ingenious innovations. As the real agricultural problem-solvers must understand the farmlands, we encourage our employees, from whatever field of expertise, to continually improve their know-how of smart agriculture. Therefore, a staff-tended mini indoor farm is seamlessly integrated into the space where employees can grow fruits and vegetables to spark enthusiasm towards agriculture technology and share the joy of harvest. The “electrical scarecrow” – an intelligent sensor is installed aside to assist with scientific farm management, monitoring soil condition and crop growth in real time while identifying weeds and pesticides for potential diseases.  The Luminously Open-plan Layout for Collaborative Innovations The interior design of XSpace is characterised by high ceilings, large windows and open seating, which promotes smooth, creative collaboration and inspire open-mindedness. Meantime, the “breathing” walls can absorb noises from external environment while views of the green wood allow for quiet work in a vibrant, relaxing atmosphere. Elements of agriculture and science have been naturally blended into the each of the workplace scenarios. All the conference rooms are either themed by crops and seasons, such as cotton, millet, sorghum, mulberry, winter solstice etc. or directly named after the great physicists, including Daniel Bernoulli, William Thomson and Max Planck. Also, our envision for flying further towards outer space has turned into exquisite decor accessories around the office, intended to stimulate inspirations and reminding people to strive for the impossible.  Super X Café: Promoting an Inclusive, Healthy Office Vibe A space-themed cafeteria and a boutique gym, available as employee perks, are elaborately crafted on the top floor to make XSpace a comfy home to all. Named after our industrial-graded flight control system, Super X Café is an informal but important communal hub for communication and socialising with people from diverse backgrounds, no matter colleagues of other departments, clients or business partners.  Everyone can enjoy a cup of hot latte or the refreshing cold brew from our café, which is now professionally operated by an award-wining Coffee Master. From Ethiopia and Sumatra to Kenya and Jamaica Blue Mountain, every coffee bean is carefully selected to its finest quality as we are seeking to develop intelligent agriculture solutions to help farmers produce high-quality food.  Just about 50 meters away from the café is a fully equipped workout space and in-office shower rooms specifically customised for the employees. All the fitness equipment inside the gym is strictly approved by certified trainer, catering to different physical needs from entry level, advanced to professional.  Super X Talk: Delivering the Power of Domain Knowledge In XSpace, every working week is well concluded with the anticipated Super X Talk - a knowledge sharing platform designed for interdisciplinary learning. Apart from our internal staffs, entrepreneurs, scientists, artists and business leaders from all over the world are invited to share their inspiring experience and thoughts on various themes. Topics include but not limited to wine tasting, music appreciation, travelling, cross-cultural communication, branding and how to set up a company. As a result, new ideas are inspired and discussed while different mindsets collide to enable multidisciplinary applications. Innovations inspired within the talk would be infused into the design, engineering and manufacturing of our products to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges.  It is truly believed that who we are lies in not only how we design our products, but also how we structure our workspace, build our teams and unite our employees. Everything inside XSpace, from the expansive floor plan, the names of the conference rooms to the iconic indoor farm and communal hub, is designed with our values in minds - making agriculture smarter, an ultimate goal that can only be achieved by collaborative innovation on fields.  

July 3, DALIAN – The World Economic Forum’s 13th Annual Meeting of the New Champions (AMNC), or Summer Davos, has taken place in Northeast China’s coastal city Dalian from 1st-3rd, July. As a foremost international summit to drive innovation and forge partnership, this year’s meeting, themed Leadership 4.0: Succeeding in a New Era of Globalisation, brings together a record number of participants from over 120 countries to address the world’s major challenges. As an official member of the World Economic Forum, XAG engages with other 1,800 leaders from government, business, academia and civil society in the AMNC to find creative solutions to ensure a sustainable, inclusive and human-centred future. XAG is a leading agriculture technology company and industrial UAS manufacturer, which developed its own patented agriculture drones, sensors and other digital farming tools for precision spraying, granule spreading and mapping. Justin Gong, Co-founder and Vice President of XAG, gave a keynote speech at the meeting’s session The Future Frontier of Food: Scaling Agritech, in which he discussed the potential of agrifood technology with Mariam Mohammed Saeed Al Mheiri, Minister of State for Food Security of the United Arab Emirates and other attendees holding leadership positions.At the meeting, Gong identifies the driving forces behind China’s accelerated development of smart agriculture, in addition to sharing stories on how XAG transforms the traditional agricultural production model and agri-food system through scaling and deploying drone, AI, big data and IoT technology. “Urbanisation, industrialisation and technological innovation are the main driving forces behind Chinese development in the past 30 years, when agriculture had been considered a low-value sector. However, once new technology and new finance penetrate the rural areas, smallholder economy would present great advantages,” Gong explained later in an interview. Smart Agriculture Requires Game-changing Technology The world has entered a new phase of globalisation. One of the pressing challenges is that the world’s population would expand into 10 billion and requires 56% more sustenance by 2050, whereas the amount of arable land would hardly increase. Agriculture is therefore gaining more attention and being reshaped by new technology at an unprecedented speed and scale. In China, a country struggling to feed 22% of the global population with only 8% of the world’s arable land, smart agriculture has been gradually taking root with the help of innovation and new technology. XAG has played a vital part in this process with its iterative, highly adaptive tech, when facing China’s distinctive agricultural model. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), nearly two-thirds of the 3 billion rural people from the developing world live in 475 million small farm households. Particularly in China which account for almost half of the world’s small farms, 98% of farmers manage farmlands smaller than 2 hectares. Large ground-based machinery, such as tractor, is difficult to reach these segmented lands, especially on hills and mountains. This smallholder economy has long been taken much of the blame for the less mechanised agriculture, with urbanisation and the rising labour cost further exacerbating the problems. Drone and AI: Reshape the Smallholder Economy  Drone, flexible, cost-effective and easy-to-use, is a powerful weapon to achieve precision agriculture at all kinds of terrains. Since tapping into the frontier of agriculture technology in 2013, XAG has been establishing an integrated network of digital farming infrastructure, such as large amount of RTK navigation base stations and high definition aerial survey field maps, and introducing the fully autonomous agriculture drones to the remote rural areas. This not only helps resolve the rural labour shortage, but also boost agricultural productivity.XAG P Series Plant Protection UAS sprays over terracesFor example, through the precision spraying and seeding technology, XAG’s plant protection drone proves to save the use of pesticides by more than 30%. For the past five years, such operation has reduced over 6,000 tons of pesticide use, conserved 1.4 million tons of agricultural water and helped farmers achieve a total crop yield increase by 980,000 kilograms. “From 2014 to 2019, XAG has provided UAS plant protection services to 4.74 million farmers. And the field data we collected through our service helps us better understand the distribution of the whole smallholder economy,” said Gong. “Looking forward into the future of smart farming, I have seen so many opportunities to explore.”XAG Training CentreSuch cool devices as drones are also encouraging many young talents back to the countryside, who give up their urban life and throw themselves into the wave of drone-centred crop protection business. To speed up the process, XAG has invested a lot in agriculture and drone related education, providing nearly 50,000 users with opportunities to professional farming. Riding over the Wave of Industry 4.0 and Consumer Upgrading  How Industry 4.0 or digital revolution can serve as a catalyst to smart agriculture is another debated topic in this year’s AMNC. The convergence of drone, AI and mobile internet technology can not only inform farmers of scientific decisions to manage the farms, but also induce new finance model in the countryside. XAG Agriculture Intelligence (XAI), an AI-powered engine developed by XAG, is being applied to the fields to enable variable-rate application supported by AI prescription maps. Field edge recognition, fruit tree locating and weed detection can all be done with ease by XAI, based on the HD RGB and multispectral maps captured by XMission surveying UAS.XMission conducts surveying operationFruit tree locating by XAIMeanwhile, as these new technologies being introduced into the farmlands, financial institutions would change their attitudes towards smallholders who find it difficult to apply for loans. This is made possible when agricultural production and service records are digitalised and shared with outside financial institutions to build individual credit risk scoring system for farmers. In China, XAG has partnered with some of the biggest financial institutions such as Alipay to offer farmers, even those without credit card or collateral, convenient, equal access to loans and claims. For instance, a farmer in Xinjiang, China has utilised XAG P Series Plant Protection UAS to conduct spraying operation as well as the XAG Farm Monitor to supervise the real-time crop growth. These smart devices have automatically collected an enormous amount of agriculture data which can serve as the farmer’s credit records. When an unexpected hail strikes and injures his Korla pears, the insurance company can immediately confirm such fact and approve his claim based on the agriculture production data.XAG Farm MonitorBesides, consumer upgrading has urged the agriculture industry to disrupt the traditional labour-intensive, resource-consuming pattern, while higher product quality and more traceable, transparent food value chain in turn attract consumers to go for premium produce. Therefore, apart from improving the agriculture production process, XAG has also been striving to rebuild the trust between producers and consumers, through its big data and IoT system. The data collected by XAG’s drones include the types of pesticides and the chemical dosage for each spraying – all of which can be uploaded into the cloud and available to be shared to buyers and consumers.UAS operation demo in AustraliaUp to date, XAG’s products and services have successfully operated in a global network of 38 countries such as Japan, Korea, US and Australia. Born in China, XAG will continue to develop intelligent agriculture solutions adapted to local economy, resolving the food safety problem while creating a more diversified, sustainable future for the world.

July 7th, JEONJU – The Chinese leading agriculture technology company XAG has recently joined the Jeonju Drone Industry International Expo 2019 with its drone-based smart agriculture solutions. This year’s event, which took place in Jeonju World Cup Stadium, South Korea from July 5-7, has attracted over 250 domestic and foreign exhibitors such as Korean Air and the Republic of Korea Army. XAG, whose booth located in the overseas exhibition hall, has demonstrated its precision agriculture ecosystem including the fully autonomous P Series Plant Protection UAS, XMission Multifunctional UAS and Field Monitor. Professional farmers, entrepreneurs and other audience were specifically drawn to XAG’s advanced industrial design and atomisation spraying system. South Korea has been facing difficulty in securing agricultural workforce, largely attributed to the steady migration to urban districts as well as the aging farming population. According to Statistics Korea, the number of households engaged in the agriculture sector has notably decreased by 42.5% in less than two decades. Smart agriculture technology plays an important role in rejuvenating Korea’s rural economy. By introducing drone and AI technology to replace physical manpower, XAG is set to enable precision agriculture in South Korea to improve its production efficiency while boosting crop yield in a sustainable way.