The leading future agriculture company Daedong(000490) said on the 28th it was selected as the final operator for the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs' "national agriculture AX platform establishment and operation project" and will push the project in earnest.
The national agriculture AX platform is a new agriculture AI transformation (AX) business model in which private companies lead the project and the government supports finance and administration. The government, local governments, and private companies jointly invest in a special purpose company (SPC) to establish the business base, and the SPC is responsible for project operation and revenue generation. The goal is to combine public policy support with private technology and business capabilities to spread AI agriculture as a sustainable industry beyond one-off technology distribution.
Daedong plans to form a consortium with LG CNS(064400), Daedong Agtech, Daeyoung GS, Art Farm Agricultural Corporation, Jeonnam-Gwangju Integrated Special City, and Muan County to establish a public-private SPC within the year. As the lead company, Daedong will oversee project promotion and operations based on its accumulated technology and business capabilities in AI agricultural machinery, Autonomous Driving, and precision agriculture.
Daedong affiliate Daedong Agtech will supply core smart agriculture technologies. It will provide next-generation smart greenhouse technologies, including Autonomous Driving hardware and control solutions, AI greenhouse construction, AI-based cultivation solutions, and autonomous agricultural robots, and is expected to play a key role in platform operations.
The total project investment is 254.6 billion won, and Daedong will contribute about 20 billion won. According to the business plan, the SPC aims to achieve cumulative sales of 1.53 trillion won over the next 20 years through the sale and distribution of agricultural products produced in AI greenhouses, AI and data platform services, and precision fieldwork services. It is designed to establish an agriculture AX business model operated on its own revenue without relying on government support projects, and to allow extensions after project completion depending on performance and operating conditions.
The SPC will build and operate three core businesses: an AI and data platform, AI greenhouses, and precision fieldwork services. It will integrate growth, environment, task, and production data generated in open-field and facility agriculture, and AI will analyze it to support farming decision-making. The analysis results will link to actual work by Autonomous Driving agricultural machinery and agricultural robots, establishing a virtuous agriculture AX cycle from data collection to AI analysis, on-site execution, and new data accumulation.
An AI greenhouse of about 216,000 square meters (about 65,000 pyeong) will also be built in Muan County. It will apply automation technologies such as AI-based environment and growth management, integrated control, and agricultural robots, and plans to link data generated in the greenhouse with the AI platform for growth diagnostics, harvest forecasting, and cultivation decision-making. By combining data and automation technologies in a large-scale AI greenhouse to verify productivity and business viability over the long term, it is expected to become a leading model driving the spread of advanced glass greenhouses in Korea.
Daedong Vice Chairman Won Yu-hyeon said, "Through this project, we will build a national agriculture AX standard model that connects agricultural AI technology to actual business and expand it at home and abroad to develop it into a competitive 'K-AI agriculture' model," adding, "We will mobilize Daedong's capabilities in AI, robotics, advanced agricultural machinery, and smart farming that we have prepared over the past five years to contribute to the success of the national agriculture AX."