URUMQI | Xinhua | As golden October paints the Tianshan Mountains with autumn hues, cotton fields across Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwest China are bursting with white bolls ready for harvest.
At the “super cotton field” in Yuli County on the northern edge of the Taklimakan Desert, cotton pickers shuttle back and forth, gathering, compressing and baling the pristine white fibers into neat packages.
“We have deployed a new agricultural drone that requires no pilot operation, making cotton cultivation management even more intelligent,” said Ai Haipeng, project director of this field.
Xinjiang is China’s largest premium cotton production base, with output accounting for 92.8 percent of the national total in 2025. Its total yield and per-unit yield have ranked first in the country for 32 consecutive years. Across this region, smart farming scenarios are increasingly permeating every stage of cotton production, accelerating from demonstration projects to widespread adoption and giving rise to a cohort of “new-generation cotton farmers” who understand technology, excel at management and know how to run operations.
Yuli County, thanks to its arid climate and abundant sunlight, is an ideal base for premium commercial cotton cultivation, with a stable planting area of over one million mu (about 66,667 hectares). In 2021, via support from the county government, agricultural robotics company XAG launched the super cotton field project, sending Ai and Ling Lei, two post-1990s agronomists, to manage 3,000 mu of cotton fields and explore a replicable, scalable unmanned agricultural management model.
The pair began by tackling irrigation, the most labor-intensive aspect of cotton management, and continuously upgraded unmanned, intelligent monitoring technologies and equipment. This effort has made the super cotton field management model highly compatible with large-scale cotton cultivation, achieving higher yields and superior quality.
“Through years of effort, the project has achieved intelligent management of water, fertilizer and pesticides, with unmanned operation rates in management reaching 75 percent,” Ai said. By the end of 2025, the super cotton field’s cultivation management model had been extended to over two million mu across Xinjiang.
This year, the project introduced a new batch of equipment: the latest APC4 autopilot system enables seeders to automatically cut mulch film during planting, further saving labor. The most talked-about addition, however, is the X150 agricultural drone. This drone can automatically mix pesticides, refill, recharge, plan routes and execute autonomous spraying operations, catering to a range of field needs including weeding, pest control and disease prevention.
On Sept. 20, during the critical boll-opening period, Ai selected a template on his phone and tapped “Start.” The drone then autonomously took off, landed and recharged — with no pilot and no remote control required. On the phone screen, the status of the pesticide tank and ground chemical reserves were visible at a glance.
“In previous years, even with drones, we still needed pilots to control trajectories and handle refills and battery swaps. Now, you just leave the aircraft in the field and walk away. Go to bed at night, come back the next morning, and it has completed all plant protection tasks,” Ai said. The new drone model has since been promoted nationwide.
“Our goal is to attract more young people back to agriculture. An industry only thrives when it has talent and young blood, giving it vitality and room for growth, and ultimately making Chinese agriculture better,” Ai added.
In Donggou Village, Dianba Township of the city of Changji, located at the northern foot of the Tianshan Mountains, family farm owner Guo Teng, also born in the 1990s, sat watching a screen as he directed a massive cotton picker which was moving slowly through a sea of cotton, continuously ejecting neatly packed bales.
Guo, a native of Changji, represents the second generation of cotton farmers in his family. His father’s generation, he recalled, faced brutal toil: one mu of cotton required enormous manual labor for management and harvesting. A single picker could harvest at most 10 mu per season, while several hundred mu required hiring over 40 workers, who started before dawn and toiled under the scorching sun. Harvest costs were high, and yet growers’ incomes remained limited.
“I used to think farming was drudgery, exhausting and undignified. But now the countryside offers so much room for development that I naturally came back,” Guo said. After graduating, he spent time in the city before recognizing that Xinjiang’s increasingly technology-rich cotton fields were opening unprecedented opportunities for a new generation of farmers. After a discussion with his wife, Guo decided to return home to grow cotton.
Today, Guo’s family farm is fully equipped with agricultural machinery, featuring four cotton pickers, six drones, over a dozen seeders and three high-horsepower tractors. Integrated water-fertilizer precision drip irrigation and drone-based fertilizing and pesticide application are used in the fields. He has also assembled long-term seasonal teams specializing in plowing, drone spraying, cotton harvesting and drip irrigation. From plowing and seeding to spraying and harvesting, the entire process is mechanized.
“One cotton picker can harvest 400 to 450 mu per day, with fuel and labor costs of just 60 yuan (9 U.S. dollars) per mu for the harvesting stage. What used to take dozens of workers an entire season can now be done by one machine,” Guo said. Thanks to large-scale, mechanized operations, his 25,000 mu of cotton fields require only 50 workers for daily management.
“The more advanced the equipment, the higher the demands on the manager,” Guo noted. Farmers in the new era are no longer mere manual laborers, but farm managers who understand machinery, data and business operations. Farming is now not a fallback livelihood but a respectable and promising career.
Returning to the countryside to grow cotton is becoming an increasingly popular choice for young people. Guo has observed that among his long-term collaborative teams, more and more young people are coming back. “As long as you master the skills and can operate a cotton picker, earning 50,000 yuan a month during the harvest season is entirely feasible. Working in cotton production in the countryside pays no less than working in the city,” he said. ■
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