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AgriAgent: End-to-End Large Model Agent System Architecture for Agricultural Environment Control
Smart Agriculture 2026, 8(2): 220-236
Published: 01 March 2026
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Objective

Large language models(LLMs)have demonstrated strong capabilities in natural language understanding, knowledge integration, and complex reasoning, offering new opportunities for intelligent decision-making in agriculture. However, their direct application in agricultural production and facility environment control remains challenging due to strong physical constraints and high operational risks. The lack of real-world interaction and executable decision grounding limits the practical effectiveness of conventional LLMs in such scenarios. To address these challenges, a tool-augmented LLM-based agricultural intelligent agent system, termed AgriAgent, was proposed, and a digital-twin-based evaluation platform for agricultural decision-making was developed. By integrating a high-fidelity digital twin environment with an end-to-end agent architecture, the decision-making performance of agricultural intelligent agents with different parameter scales was systematically evaluated across multiple crops and climate scenarios.

Methods

A high-fidelity agricultural digital twin evaluation platform was constructed using the decision support system for agrotechnology transfer(DSSAT)v4.8 crop growth model as the core simulation engine to model crop growth under diverse environmental conditions and management strategies. Meteorological driving data were obtained from the Seoul Historical Weather Data dataset. Through data cleaning, missing-value imputation, unit normalization, and time-series reconstruction, the raw meteorological data were transformed into standardized inputs compatible with DSSAT. Three climate scenarios representing different environmental complexities were designed, including a regular scenario, a perturbed scenario, and an extreme scenario. The regular scenario employed historical observations, the perturbed scenario introduced stochastic disturbances to simulate short-term climate variability, and the extreme scenario incorporated multi-factor coupled stresses such as high temperatures and excessive precipitation during sensitive growth stages. In total, 90 annual climate driving sequences were generated. Fixed soil profile parameters calibrated by domain experts were applied across all simulations to minimize confounding effects. Within this digital twin environment, a tool-augmented agricultural intelligent agent, AgriAgent, was implemented using a modular architecture consisting of a sensor module, memory module, retriever, large language model, and tool executor, forming a closed-loop decision-making framework. In each decision cycle, the agent perceived environmental and crop state information, including soil moisture and nutrient status, meteorological conditions, crop growth stages, and stress indicators. State summaries and historical decisions were stored in memory, while agronomic knowledge was retrieved through a retrieval-augmented generation mechanism. Based on integrated information, the LLM generated structured environmental control commands in JSON format, which were validated and constrained by the tool executor before updating the DSSAT environment. The system supported irrigation, supplementary lighting, ventilation, heating, fertilization, and CO2 enrichment. Five representative crops: maize, millet, sugar beet, tomato, and cabbage were simulated under the three climate scenarios over complete growing seasons, resulting in 450 crop-scenario combinations. An unmanaged DSSAT simulation served as the baseline. AgriAgent models with three parameter scales(1.5B, 3B, and 7B), built on the Qwen2.5 series, were evaluated. Crop economic yield expressed as dry matter at physiological maturity was adopted as the evaluation metric.

Results and Discussions

The results showed that AgriAgent consistently outperformed the baseline across all crops and climate scenarios, with model scale exerting a significant influence on decision-making performance. AgriAgent-7B achieved the best overall performance under regular, perturbed, and extreme scenarios, demonstrating strong generalization ability and environmental adaptability. By dynamically adjusting water, nutrient, light, and thermal management strategies, the agent effectively mitigated environmental stresses even under multi-factor coupled extreme climate conditions. Under extreme scenarios, AgriAgent-7B increased yields by 463.60% for maize, 351.20% for millet, 125.40% for sugar beet, 1537.46% for tomato, and 1185.14% for cabbage compared with the baseline. Particularly large gains were observed for high-value crops such as tomato and cabbage, highlighting the advantages of the proposed framework for precision-controlled facility agriculture. In contrast, AgriAgent-1.5B exhibited performance comparable to the baseline, while AgriAgent-3B achieved moderate improvements but remained inferior to the 7B model. These findings indicate a clear scaling effect, suggesting that larger models possess stronger capabilities in multi-source information integration, long-term temporal reasoning, and adaptation to complex environments.

Conclusions

This study developed a digital-twin-based agricultural decision evaluation platform and proposed a tool-augmented, end-to-end agricultural intelligent agent named AgriAgent. Experiments across multiple crops and climate scenarios verified the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework for dynamic agricultural decision-making. The results demonstrate that integrating knowledge retrieval, reasoning, and tool execution within a closed-loop LLM-based agent enables stable, reliable, and adaptive environmental control, providing a feasible technical pathway and standardized evaluation paradigm for intelligent agriculture.

Issue
Key technologies and development trends of intelligent decision-making large models for facility agriculture
Transactions of the Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering 2025, 41(13): 50-61
Published: 15 July 2025
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Intelligent decision-making can be expected to improve protected agriculture, particularly in labor-intensive areas. Thereby, the productivity can be enhanced in facility agriculture. The intelligent decision-making technologies can also hold significant importance: One, the production efficiency and quality can be enhanced to ensure the supply, production, and income in the agricultural modernization; Another, the emerging technologies can be integrated into the precise environmental monitoring and personalized management. This research aims to focus on the multiple scenarios of the key application, such as the greenhouse environment control, modeling and prediction of the crop growth, pest and disease identification, as well as the crop phenotypic monitoring. The relevant emerging technologies were also introduced in the current protected agriculture. A systematic investigation was then made to determine the basic technologies of the visual, language, multi-modal, embodied intelligent, and large multi-agent models. The application potential of the existing large models was assessed in the key scenarios of protected agriculture. Large language models were generated from the agricultural data, providing suggestions and decision-making support to agricultural production. Crop models were established to predict the growth status of the crops in greenhouse environments. The decision-making of the large models was also utilized in the intelligent decision-making for protected agriculture. The intelligent perception of the crop semantic information was integrated with a large visual segmentation model in order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the decision-making. The data reception, processing, feedback, and decision-making were selected in the greenhouse environment control for the protected agriculture. The physical environment was interacted to achieve the real-time environmental regulation. Embodied intelligence also emphasized that the agents were suitable for the complex environments in both the digital and physical worlds. The multi-modal data of the embodied intelligence depended mainly on the architecture training of the large model for the protected agriculture. A multi-agent large model consisted of multiple interactive AI agents that operated independently to make decisions and then take actions autonomously, according to the environmental changes. The entire production cycle of protected agriculture, data integration, and sharing was achieved after data integration. Multiple large model was collaborated and then interacted for the intelligent decision-making. The multi-model collaboration balanced the advantages of each model. The information mining and accurate analysis were conducted to improve the efficiency and quality of the agricultural production. In conclusion, the large model was improved with traditional protected agriculture, such as information perception, growth model construction, and precise decision-making. An intelligent decision-making system was constructed to promote protected agriculture. The crop growth and the environmental trends were more accurately evaluated after the processing of the multi-source heterogeneous data using large models. The finding can provide a scientific and precise decision-making basis for agricultural production. Intelligent decision-making was also the key driving force for agricultural development. The prosperous agriculture was promoted to fully explore the multi-source heterogeneous data, in order to unlock the potential value of data. An intelligent decision-making system was accelerated to construct for the various application scenarios of protected agriculture using large models. The finding can also provide scientific guidance to reduce the production costs for the high economic benefits.

Open Access Short Communication Issue
iBP-seq: An efficient and low-cost multiplex targeted genotyping and epigenotyping system
The Crop Journal 2023, 11(5): 1605-1610
Published: 29 April 2023
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Downloads:7

Inter- and intra-specific variations in phenotype are common and can be associated with genomic mutations as well as epigenomic variation. Profiling both genomic and epigenomic variants is at the core of dissecting phenotypic variation. However, an efficient targeted genotyping and epigenotyping system is lacking. We describe a new multiplex targeted genotyping and epigenotyping system called improved bulked-PCR sequencing (iBP-seq). We employed iBP-seq for the detection of genotypes and methylation levels of dozens of target regions in mixed DNA samples. iBP-seq can be adapted for the construction of linkage maps, fine mapping of quantitative-trait loci, and detection of genome editing mutations at a cost as low as $0.016 per site per sample. We developed an automated bioinformatics pipeline, including primer design, a series of bioinformatic analyses for genotyping and epigenotyping, and visualization of results. iBP-seq and its bioinformatics pipeline, available at http://zeasystemsbio.hzau.edu.cn/tools/ibp/, can be adapted to a wide variety of species.

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