Chunjiang Zhao
China National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture

The widespread applications of information technology and modern equipment technique in the whole process of agriculture have profoundly changed the traditional agricultural production. It is inevitable that the integration of information technology and agriculture to realized intelligent management of agriculture based on information and knowledge becomes the key direction of agriculture development in future and would breed a new agricultural technology revolution.
Agricultural information technology meets the objectives to improve the structure and function of agricultural system, to promote the use efficiency of agricultural resources and to achieve high yield, quality. The following aspects concerned are: (1) real-time information acquisition technology of agricultural objects (animals, plants, environment and agricultural products) and processes (growth, production, storage and circulation) in different time scales; (2)intelligent information processing and decision-making of agricultural planning, management and circulation based on information, knowledge and models; (3)efficient and energy-saving precision control and implement technique system based, intelligent equipment; (4) agriculture information service based on network and cloud computing.
Agricultural information technology challenges with a series of complicated scientific and technical issues, such as agricultural information perception under complicated scenarios, efficient and reliable transmission of agriculture information in wide-area space; knowledge mining based on vast amount of information, model construction and decision-making support in complicated life systems, demand-based precision operation and the integration and coordination of different technique systems.
Following information technology for agriculture are discussed: (1) advanced sensors for agriculture; (2)internet of things for agriculture; (3) precision agriculture and operation system; (43)agricultural robots; (5)modern information service technology.