Russian Farmers to Get a Universal Digital Assistant
Artificial intelligence and robotics are moving into agriculture, promising to boost yields and simplify reporting for farmers across Russia.
Russia is developing a unified digital platform for managing agriculture, powered by artificial intelligence and robotics. The system is designed to help farmers increase crop yields while reducing the complexity of reporting requirements to the state, according to Vladimir Filatov, director of the Center for Engineering Project Management at the State University of Management.
The project represents one of the country’s largest digital transformation and automation efforts in agribusiness. Its creators envision a platform that connects farmers, government, and research institutions on a single technological backbone, making fieldwork more efficient and highly automated.
In many ways, the initiative mirrors the creation of “Gosuslugi,” Russia’s national digital services portal—but this time tailored for agriculture. The platform will gather real-time data from fields, including information on plant health, soil conditions, and weather. Specialized neural networks will process the information and provide farmers with customized recommendations: when and what to sow, how to treat crops for disease, which equipment to deploy, and which subsidies may be available.
The system is designed to scale, from small family farms to the country’s largest agribusiness holdings. A major component is robotics: domestically developed autonomous machinery and drone technology, built by partner organizations, will carry out most of the fieldwork. Farmers’ roles will shift toward monitoring operations and making critical decisions in nonstandard situations.
Pilot testing of the digital platform is planned at the experimental fields of the Omsk Agrarian Science Center. After evaluation and refinement, the system will be adapted for rollout in other regions, taking into account their soil and climate conditions.
