Hada Co., Ltd. CEO Ha Jong-woo to Build a Common Android/iOS-Style Platform for Agricultural Machinery

According to the Rural Development Administration, Korea’s mechanization rate for dry-field agriculture stands at 67% as of 2024. The seeding and transplanting stage, in which seeds are sown and seedlings are planted, remains at just 18.2%. There have been quite a few national research and development (R&D) projects to develop agricultural machinery equipped with autonomous driving functions. The problem is that each project has built basic functions such as control, monitoring, and autonomous driving from scratch. Software that runs only for a specific project has become even narrower in usefulness in Korea’s already small agricultural machinery market, and similar investments have been repeated without crossing the threshold to commercialization.

Hada Co., Ltd. (Iksan, Jeonbuk State), a company specializing in dry-field crop implements, has set out to break this cycle. Hada is the lead organization for the Korea Institute of Planning and Evaluation for Technology in Food, Agriculture and Forestry (IPET) project titled “Integrated Operation and Demonstration of Intelligent Agricultural Work Based on an Open Robotic Platform Covering the Full Cycle of Dry-Field Agriculture,” leading research worth 9.3 billion won in government support and 3 billion won in institutional contributions from April 1, 2026, to December 31, 2030. This project is one of 18 projects included in the agricultural robot program into which the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and the Rural Development Administration will invest 57.262 billion won over five years from 2026 to 2030. We met with CEO Ha Jong-woo, who is carrying out the project in earnest, to hear about the project’s direction and plans.
 

Opening the Era of a Common Platform for Agricultural Machinery

CEO Ha identified software as the core of this project. He explained, “Existing software R&D has tended to be limited to software that can be used only in the relevant project, rather than creating common standards, so even when development was completed, it did not reach commercialization and duplicate investment continued. The key point of this project is to create a common platform like Android or iOS so that if any third party develops functions such as autonomous driving as apps and uploads them, many companies and users can make use of them.” Ha said the largest share of the budget allocation and research team composition is also concentrated in the software field.

Underlying this concept is the idea of “software-defined machinery” (SDM, Software Defined Machine). Ha cited Tesla as an example. In the past, a car’s functions did not change after purchase, but with Tesla, vehicle performance improves through software updates alone without changing the hardware. He said, “As the role of software in agricultural equipment grows, the broader trend is shifting toward all architecture, including hardware, being built around software. From the consumer’s perspective, it can be seen as control gradually moving over to software.”
 

The Autonomous Driving Gap with Leading Overseas Companies Is Small, While Dry-Field Crop Implements Are at About Half Their Level

He said the technology gap with leading overseas companies such as John Deere and Kubota must be examined by field. His assessment is that there is not a large difference between Korea and other countries in autonomous driving and automatic steering technologies, which have already been released as open source. “In this field, the industrial aspect of how cheaply and reliably something can be made is a bigger standard for determining whether the technology is good or bad,” he said.

By contrast, the situation is different for implements such as seeders and sprayers. Functions that detect whether missed seeding has occurred when seeds are dropped and then compensate for it, functions that use video (vision) to view crops and adjust spraying volume, and functions that control application volume according to driving speed cannot be completed with software alone. Ha said, “These are areas where the system must be completed, including software, hardware, and the control devices that connect the two,” adding that in this area, domestic technology has much to catch up on. His assessment is that if leading overseas companies are rated at 10, Korea’s dry-field crop implement technology is around 5.
 

15 kW Electric Platform, Starting with “Half-Day Work”

The electric robot platform being developed under the project has a motor output of 15 kW (about 20 horsepower) and a battery capacity of 40 kWh. The output was set at a similar level after analyzing the power of Japanese equipment, and the battery was based on four hours of work, or half a day. Ha said, “It would be good to use it for a full eight hours, but for now we decided on specifications that can be used for half a day. If a fast-charging function is added in the future so that it can be fully charged during lunch after morning work, it can be used for another four hours.” The current specifications do not include fast charging, and the plan is to add fast charging that enables a full charge in 30 minutes to one hour at the final stage.
 

For the App Ecosystem, It Ultimately Comes Down to “Whether It Makes Money”

The project proposes a structure in which agricultural work apps for tillage, seeding, spraying, harvesting, and other tasks are downloaded and used from the marketplace of the platform operating system (OS). Ha believes that attracting external developers ultimately requires profitability. He expects that in the early stages, general-purpose apps such as autonomous driving, which can be used for most tasks, will appear first. He asked rhetorically, “Even if the number of users is small, if the economic advantage of using that app is large, people will buy it even at a high price. If you can earn 10 million won a year, wouldn’t you buy it even for 1 million won?”

App users, like developers, are also an unspecified multitude. Manufacturers may buy apps and put them into equipment, or farmers may buy them directly. Ha believes that if a structure is created in which farms upload actual farming data through apps and earn revenue, they will download even paid apps sufficiently. He also said that for areas where development is difficult based on economic logic alone but where automation, AI adoption, and datafication are essential, developer participation can be encouraged through government subsidy programs.
 

ISOBUS and AEF Certification Are “Absolutely Necessary”

The project also aims to support ISOBUS, the international communication standard between tractors and implements, and to obtain certification from the Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation (AEF). Ha said, “To officially promote and sell ISOBUS in export markets, AEF certification is required. In the domestic market as well, once ISOBUS spreads, certified products will gain much greater trust.” He added, “There is still no standard other than that (ISOBUS),” emphasizing that it is “something we absolutely have to pursue.”
 

Shared Technologies Will Be Used Together and Existing Technologies Protected…Pursuing a Joint Development Agreement

Agricultural machinery companies such as LS Mtron, universities, and government agencies are participating in the project together. It is a so-called “coopetition” structure, a combination of cooperation and competition, in which companies that compete in the market cooperate within a single project. Ha said that while there are not major issues of interests with institutions, rights relationships between companies may become complicated when new technologies are developed or commercialized, and that sorting this out in advance is “an extremely difficult part.” According to Ha, a joint development agreement (JDA) among the participating organizations has not yet been signed. He said, “At the fourth meeting at the end of this year (2026), we intend to reach a broad agreement that jointly developed technologies will be used together, while rights to technologies that each party already possessed will of course be protected.”
 

The First Demonstration Crops Are Garlic and Onions

The first demonstration crops are garlic and onions, and demonstrations will be conducted in major production areas such as the Gyeongsangnam-do Agricultural Research and Extension Services and Changnyeong County, South Gyeongsang Province. Ha explained the reason for the selection, saying, “Garlic and onions are among the dry-field crops into which the government invests the most, and they require more labor than other crops. They are also among the most widely consumed seasoning vegetables in Korea, making them a good environment for applying advanced technologies.” Hada’s experience accumulated in the onion sector was also naturally connected. This project focuses on seeding and subsequent cultivation management during the growing season, such as spraying and fertilization.
 

Starting with Farming Corporations and Large Farms…Rental Business Centers Come Next

The commercialization model adds functional subscriptions to sales of an entry-level product. Acknowledging that subscription culture is not yet familiar to domestic farmers, Ha said, “Rather than whether subscriptions work well or not, the key is how we approach them and how much the cost is. Ultimately, what matters is that farms have high satisfaction when they pay the subscription fee.” He added that if satisfaction is low, a multifaceted analysis will be needed, including ways to increase participation rates through government support programs.

For distribution, the first target is farming corporations made up of farms of some scale. This is based on the judgment that new technologies must always be tried first by large farms before spreading to smaller farms. Agricultural machinery rental business centers are the next stage. Ha explained that small quantities of equipment are first introduced to influential farms through the Rural Development Administration’s new technology dissemination projects or demonstration projects and undergo verification before leading to general distribution, including rentals. Ha said, “It will be difficult to supply the equipment to rental business centers immediately just because it has been developed. Given the price of the equipment and system, it will have to undergo demonstrations backed by government support.”
 

Overseas Expansion Begins with Japan

The project aims to achieve 1 billion won in trial sales by 2030 and has proposed supply to large domestic manufacturers through original equipment manufacturing (OEM), as well as overseas sales channels in Japan, France, Africa, and elsewhere. Ha said, “In the short term, of course the focus is domestic,” but added, “For operating equipment such as tractors, the limits of the domestic market are clear, so in the mid- to long term we have to look overseas.” The first targets are countries with per capita gross domestic product (GDP) levels similar to Korea’s and an interest in precision agriculture, with Japan mentioned first and Europe following. He viewed entry into the United States in the short term as not easy because the standards for farmland scale are too different.
 

Expectations for a Shift in the View That It Is Too Early for Electric Agricultural Machinery

Hada, which has developed dry-field crop implements since its founding in 2012, is expanding its role through this project into a company that leads a robot platform and software ecosystem. Ha said that if the project is successfully completed, he expects two changes. One is that farms will directly experience precision agriculture, in which software plays a major role, being implemented in actual fields, and the other is to show farms and other industries the possibility of changing the power source from petroleum to electricity.

However, he was cautious about the pace. He said, “It will be difficult for all machines to become eco-friendly just because the project ends, and even in 2030 it will probably still be at the initial stage. In markets such as tractors, there are still far more people who think electric power is premature, but I hope our project can serve as a catalyst and guide that thinking even slightly toward eco-friendliness.” He added, “Agricultural machinery must be viewed over a much longer horizon than general industry.”