[Ha Yoo-shin Column] AI Farm Machinery That Stops in the Field: The Solution Is On-Site Verification

[Ha Yoo-shin Column] AI Farm Machinery That Stops in the Field: The Solution Is On-Site Verification
Ha Yoo-shin, Director of the Field Agricultural Machinery Development Research Center, Kyungpook National University

First, I sincerely congratulate Korea Agricultural Technology News on its launch. Amid the compound crises of the climate crisis, a declining agricultural population, and the aging of rural communities, the path this publication is taking—launching with a commitment to technology-centered, field-verified solutions—is highly timely. At a time when physical AI and autonomous driving are opening new possibilities for agriculture, narrowing the gap between the speed of technology and the speed of the field is a pressing task that our agricultural industry must solve.

Technology is advancing fast, but the road to the field is long
Autonomous driving and AI technologies for agriculture have already entered the commercialization stage, but it still takes considerable time for them to take root in actual fields. If the first barrier is the reality of multi-variety, small-volume production, small and sloped plots, investment costs reaching hundreds of millions of won, and insufficient maintenance infrastructure, then the second barrier is the institutional time lag in which the structure linking testing and certification to dissemination cannot fully keep pace with the rapid speed of technological change. There is an urgent need for institutional design that more tightly connects testing, demonstration, dissemination, and financing—the pathways that come after research and development.

International alignment of the testing system and institutionalization of field verification
The first task is the international alignment of the agricultural machinery testing system. Korea already has a system at the international level: the Rural Development Administration holds the status of chair country for the OECD tractor test codes, the Korea Agriculture Technology Promotion Agency conducts testing as an internationally accredited testing institution, and systems such as NET certification for new technology agricultural machinery are already in operation. On this foundation, while safety should remain under legally mandated public testing, the share of corporate responsibility and market verification in the performance sector should be gradually expanded. There is also a need to exempt or reduce duplicate testing for models holding OECD Code 2 and Code 4 reports, and to introduce one-stop evaluation linking testing and new technology certification for electrified, autonomous, and robotic agricultural machinery, along with a dedicated fast track for new technologies. This is not a proposal to bypass formal testing; rather, it is a proposal to institutionalize field verification by requiring the mandatory recording of work performance, breakdown frequency, safety accidents, and labor-time reduction data at demonstration sites, and ensuring that those results naturally lead into testing, financing, and dissemination. It should be explicitly specified as a core task in the 10th Basic Plan for Agricultural Mechanization, which is soon to be established.

Human-centered UX and safety are not options but basic specifications
The second task is the integrated design of human-centered UX and safety functions. The users in rural settings are not developers in laboratories, but elderly people, women, new farmers, and foreign seasonal workers. Large text, voice guidance, one-touch control, automatic fault diagnosis, and remote monitoring must become basic specifications rather than optional features, while AI-based obstacle detection, emergency stop, and rollover prevention must be built in from the design stage. The most realistic way to reduce agricultural machinery accidents is not to tell farmers to be more careful, but to distribute machines that are designed to be less dangerous.

Field Agriculture Mechanization 2.0 — Beyond standardization to full-cycle productivity
The third task is a paradigm shift. If Field Agriculture Mechanization 1.0 was the stage of creating standardized cultivation systems—such as ridge width, planting intervals, and crop arrangement—to fit machine operations, then the Field Agriculture Mechanization 2.0 that I propose is the stage of raising productivity, quality, and post-harvest handling together on the basis of that standardization. The key is not to distribute one more machine. It is to shift to cultivation methods that make seeding easier, and to tie those cultivation methods seamlessly to weeding, irrigation, harvesting, curing, storage, and shipment so as to improve productivity across the entire cycle.

In this regard, garlic is the crop that most clearly shows the need for 2.0. From the perspective of mechanization, non-mulching or early removal of plastic film is clearly advantageous, but changing the cultivation method alone is not enough. If one moves to non-mulching, additional irrigation to stabilize germination and establishment, reinforcement of the weeding system to reduce weed competition, and deep fertilization for nutrient efficiency must all accompany it. The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs’ garlic mechanization standard model demonstration research project, for which I am currently responsible, also stands precisely on this awareness of the problem. The Rural Development Administration, too, while evaluating non-mulching garlic as a technology favorable to mechanization, has presented a direction of supplementing planting density, irrigation, and ridge fertilization to preserve productivity, and resolving weed issues in connection with spring growing-season response systems. Going one step further, there is a need to accumulate data on registered chemicals, timing of use, and residue tests under non-mulching garlic conditions, and to establish herbicide operation standards suited to the field within the PLS system. In addition, in line with the spread of non-mulching cultivation in the field, the underwriting criteria and coverage system of crop disaster insurance must also be checked for consistency so that farmers can confidently shift cultivation methods. The data accumulated through standard model demonstrations should serve precisely as the evidentiary basis for such institutional improvements.

Main production area package demonstrations and APC linkage complete 2.0
Field Agriculture Mechanization 2.0 should begin not with uniform nationwide dissemination, but with package demonstrations in main production areas by crop. Centered on crops with clear main production areas and mechanization bottlenecks—such as garlic, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and soybeans—it should be demonstrated as a single full-cycle package from seeding/transplanting–covering (or non-mulching)–irrigation and weeding–pest control–harvesting–curing and storage–to APC shipment, and the evaluation indicators should go beyond unit-process performance to include labor time, harvest loss, marketable yield rate, storage loss, and changes in farm income.

In particular, post-harvest management and APCs (Agricultural Products Processing Centers) are not auxiliary areas of 2.0 but core components. Even in garlic alone, if the processes following mechanical harvesting—stem cutting, soil removal, curing, and storage—are disconnected, the mechanization effect of seeding and harvesting at the front end is reduced accordingly. Only when APCs receive standardized produce, process it collectively, and feed that data back into cultivation and mechanization plans for the next season does the entire chain from cultivation to distribution finally operate as a single data chain.

Technology verified in the field is the competitiveness of Korea’s agricultural machinery industry
In the age of physical AI, the competitiveness of agricultural machinery is determined not by algorithms or specifications, but by stability in actual fields, usability for elderly farmers, and connectivity through post-harvest processes. The government, the Rural Development Administration, and the Korea Agriculture Technology Promotion Agency must gradually advance the linkage among testing, certification, and dissemination in line with international standards, and shift the project structure centered on unit processes toward full-cycle demonstrations in main production areas. Companies must take responsibility for technology that does not break down, is easy to use, and operates safely; academia must provide objective verification of whether that technology leads to improvements in productivity, safety, and income; and the National Assembly must take responsibility for the institutional foundation for farm work safety and the fostering of the agricultural machinery industry. The future of agriculture depends not on the fastest technology, but on technology that has been verified in the field and connected across the full cycle. I hope this publication’s launch will become a meaningful turning point in the leap forward of Korea’s agricultural industry.