Simulating the Marginal Green Contribution of AI Modules in a Smart-Agriculture Platform: Evidence from Two Monte Carlo Experiments

Zhaoyang Li; Ruijie Zhang; Zhaoji Sun; Lu Zhang

cs.AISep 6, 2026

Simulating the Marginal Green Contribution of AI Modules in a Smart-Agriculture Platform: Evidence from Two Monte Carlo Experiments

Authors: Zhaoyang Li, Ruijie Zhang, Zhaoji Sun, Lu Zhang

Organizations: Sanya University, Sanya, Hainan 572022, China · Handan Weizhi Jingjie AI Basic Software Co., Ltd.

Abstract

Smart agriculture platforms usually bundle AI diagnosis, IoT sensing and decision push into a single package, so the green benefit attributable to each component remains unclear and resource-allocation decisions lack quantitative evidence. Building on a previous platform-level Monte Carlo assessment, this paper makes the components explicit and runs two controlled simulation experiments. Experiment 1 follows the chain from AI capability to farmer behavior to agrochemical input reduction, modeling pesticide/fertilizer reduction as avoidable blind-application share times prescription effectiveness times decision-touch coverage times adoption rate, and compares an experienced-extension mode with the AI mode: the probability of reaching 20% pesticide reduction is essentially zero in the extension mode but 20.7% at baseline, up to 49% with diagnosis accuracy 0.95 and adoption 0.85 under AI; the probability of 15% fertilizer reduction rises from near zero to 52.0%. Experiment 2 compares current practice (P0), IoT engineering retrofit (P1), and P1 plus AI irrigation scheduling (P2): median aggregate water saving rises from 7.8% (P0) to 11.0% (P1) and 16.0% (P2), with AI adding 5.0 percentage points beyond engineering; paddy CH4 reduction reaches 30.5% under AI scheduling versus 19.8% under manual operation, and the rice irrigation-methane subsystem carbon intensity declines 27.9%. Sensitivity analyses of both experiments consistently indicate that the primary bottleneck for meeting green targets is farmer adoption rather than algorithm accuracy, and that AI data fusion is robust to soil-moisture sensing errors. This work provides a reproducible simulation framework for component-level green-value evaluation and promotion-strategy optimization of smart agriculture platforms.

Figures & tables

Parameter	Meaning	lo	mode	hi	Grade
$\varphi_{avoid}$	avoidable blind sprays share	0.15	0.30	0.50	C
$\eta_{exp}$	extension prescription effectiveness	0.55	0.70	0.85	C
$\gamma_{exp}$	extension coverage	0.30	0.40	0.55	C
$\gamma_{AI}$	AI coverage	0.85	0.92	0.97	B/C
$acc$	AI diagnostic accuracy	0.78	0.88	0.95	B
$\alpha$	AI suggestion adoption rate	0.35	0.60	0.85	C

Table 1: Experiment 1 parameters (triangular lo/mode/hi)

Parameter	Meaning	lo	mode	hi	Grade
$C_{m}/C_{v}/C_{r}$	tech ceiling mango/veg/rice	0.27/0.22/0.13	0.40/0.35/0.23	0.55/0.50/0.35	A/B
$q$ (P0/P1/P2)	scheduling quality	0.30/0.50/0.80	0.42/0.62/0.88	0.55/0.75/0.95	C
$\alpha$	technology adoption rate	0.30	0.55	0.80	C
$\sigma_{IoT}$	soil-moisture observation error	0.02	0.04	0.07	B
$\kappa$ (P1/P2)	error sensitivity	1.0	—	0.4	C
$\psi_{CH4}$	AWD potential	0.20	0.35	0.55	B

Table 2: Experiment 2 parameters (lo/mode/hi, three stages)

Variable	Mean	Median	P5	P95
Pesticide reduction (extension)	0.093	0.090	0.055	0.138
Pesticide reduction (AI)	0.166	0.164	0.104	0.237
Fertilizer reduction (extension)	0.066	0.065	0.040	0.095
Fertilizer reduction (AI)	0.154	0.152	0.097	0.216
AI pesticide increment	0.074	0.071	0.041	0.115
AI fertilizer increment	0.088	0.085	0.051	0.133

Table 3: Experiment 1 Monte Carlo results (N=10 4 , seed 20260907)

Figure 1: Distribution comparison of extension vs. AI modes (left: pesticide; right: fertilizer)

$acc$ $\backslash$ $\alpha$	0.35	0.60	0.85
0.70	13.1% / 1%	15.9% / 15%	18.6% / 37%
0.85	13.5% / 2%	16.5% / 20%	19.4% / 43%
0.95	13.7% / 3%	16.9% / 23%	20.1% / 49%

Table 4: Experiment 1 scenario matrix: AI pesticide reduction mean / P(pesticide

\geq

20%)

Figure 2: Experiment 1 OAT sensitivity: effects on AI-mode pesticide reduction

Indicator (median)	P0 current	P1 IoT engineering	P2 +AI decision
Mango water saving	0.092	0.131	0.190
Vegetable water saving	0.081	0.114	0.166
Rice water saving	0.054	0.076	0.110
Aggregate water saving	0.078	0.110	0.160
Paddy CH 4 reduction	0.000	0.198	0.305
Rice subsystem carbon reduction	0.007	0.182	0.279

Table 5: Experiment 2 three-stage results (medians)

Figure 3: Boxplots of three-stage aggregate water saving and paddy CH 4 reduction

Figure 4: Carbon-reduction pathway decomposition in the rice scenario: irrigation electricity and paddy CH 4 (means, kg CO 2 e/mu-season)

Figure 5: Effect of soil-moisture observation error on aggregate water saving: AI decision is more robust

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Monte Carlo-Based Ex-Ante Assessment of the Green Benefits of an AI-Driven Smart Agriculture Platform in Hainan

Smart agriculture platforms are widely regarded as key carriers for implementing China's pesticide and fertilizer reduction, water-saving and carbon-reduction agendas, yet a unified quantitative framework for assessing their green value is still lacking. Taking an AI-driven decision platform for tropical agriculture as the object (integrating large-language-model question answering, multimodal pest diagnosis, IoT sensing, satellite remote sensing, and a closed-loop field record system), this study builds a cradle-to-farm-gate agricultural carbon accounting model covering pesticide and fertilizer production, field N2O, irrigation electricity and paddy CH4, translates platform interventions into quantifiable transmission parameters, and propagates parameter uncertainty by Monte Carlo simulation over three Hainan scenarios (mango, winter vegetable, rice/nanfan, area-weighted 40%:30%:30%). Under full adoption, median reductions are 23.5% (90% interval 15.0%-33.2%) for pesticide use, 21.0% (13.8%-28.9%) for fertilizer, 16.5% (10.9%-23.5%) for irrigation water, and 21.5% (16.1%-27.2%) for carbon intensity. Attainment probabilities are high for fertilizer reduction >=15% (90.6%) and clear carbon decline (98.1%), but only about 20% for aggregate water saving >=20%, favoring scenario-specific statements. Sobol first-order indices show soil-test recommendation and organic substitution jointly explain about 83% of the variance of aggregate carbon-intensity reduction. Convergence tests show 10,000 iterations stabilize all statistics; conservative/baseline/optimistic scenario bounds are reported. The framework offers a reproducible, calibration-ready methodology for ex-ante green-value assessment and pilot observation design.

Zhaoyang Li, Ruijie Zhang, Zhaoji Sun +1

Sanya University, Sanya, Hainan 572022, China · Handan Weizhi Jingjie AI Basic Software Co., Ltd.

Precision Agriculture

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Zhinong AI: A Design-Science Study of an AI-Enabled Agricultural Decision-Support Platform for Smallholder Production

Artificial intelligence is increasingly moving from single-purpose agricultural recognition tools toward integrated decision-support systems that connect information access, diagnosis, task execution and post-action feedback. This paper presents a design-science case study of the Zhinong AI Agricultural Decision Platform, a farmer-facing system that integrates agricultural information push services, natural-language question answering, image-based crop disease diagnosis, plot and farming-calendar management, workflow orchestration, a Hainan Free Trade Port agricultural service zone and an age-friendly care mode. Based on public project materials, policy context and prior research on smart agriculture, machine learning and design science, the paper constructs a layered system architecture and a closed-loop decision process summarized as sensing, analysis, planning, execution and feedback. It further proposes a function-pain-point mapping matrix, an evaluation indicator system and a governance framework covering data provenance, model risk, expert review, privacy and adoption risk. The study does not claim measured field performance because production logs, controlled user studies and expert-labeled local image datasets were not available at the time of writing. Instead, the contribution is a structured research framework for transforming an AI agricultural prototype into an empirically testable, accountable and localized decision-support infrastructure for smallholder production.

Zhaoyang Li, Jiaqi Liu, Ruijie Zhang

University of Sanya · Hebei International Studies University

AI-Assisted Decision Making Human-Centered AI AI Governance

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Deploying and Evaluating a Smart-Agriculture Agentic Engine for Full-Season Soybean Farm Operations

This paper presents FAIRY, a full-stack smart-agriculture agent system developed for and deployed to an operating soybean research farm at Harbin Institute of Technology's smart-agriculture site. We develop FAIRY to execute and evaluate agentic agronomic operations on full-season spatiotemporal workflows that span ridge preparation, planting, irrigation, fertilization, pest and disease treatment, harvest, grain handling, drying, and storage. FAIRY integrates APIs and infrastructure across production-grade machinery, fixed soil and canopy sensors, multispectral and thermal drones, satellite vegetation products, a weather station, calibrated crop-process models, agronomic records, and multi-season yield histories. The system is built around the novel "everything is an event" execution paradigm, which represents spatiotemporal world evolution, remote sensing and UAV observations, sensor readings, crop-growth transitions, machinery actions, and management interventions as state-changing events in a shared farm process engine. On top of this event-driven world model, FAIRY implements a complete agentic stack: a knowledge library of atomic agronomic skills; multi-agent controller and orchestration backends; frontier- and edge-model execution; full-path trace logging; and deployment profiling on local nodes. We use FAIRY to evaluate nine state-of-the-art agent controllers across one hundred full-season soybean scenarios that preserve the operational coupling between spatial observations in a 64-ridge field, temporal decision sequences, agronomic constraints, delayed effects, and final yield. We develop an evaluation suite that combines agentic success, full-path spatiotemporal correctness, token cost, and edge-device runtime.

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Faculty of Computing Harbin Institute of Technology State Key Laboratory of Smart Farm Technologies and Systems Harbin, China · School of Electrical and Computer Engineering National Technical University of Athens Athens, Greece

Software Engineering Multi-Agent Orchestration Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation Precision Agriculture Agentic AI

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Abstract

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