China Agricultural University's Shennong Agricultural LLM Reaches 100,000+ Farmers With 36 Specialised Agents

China Agricultural University (CAU) has built Shennong, a large language model specialised for agriculture. The project is led by Wang Yaojun, an associate professor at CAU's School of Information and Electrical Engineering. In 2020 his team noticed that general-purpose models often answered farming questions like laymen or even contradicted common agronomic sense, because crops, soils and climates differ so much from region to region. They concluded that a vertical model needed proprietary domain data rather than only public documents. To build that data, the team spent seven months scanning more than 3,000 books from the university library and combined them with public material into a specialised database of about 20,000 books. They then travelled to more than 20 provinces to collect real soil composition, irrigation, pest and meteorological records. The resulting core knowledge base holds 10 million knowledge graph entries, 20 million labelled images and 50 million production records, about 3 PB in total. Because computing resources were limited, the team used a mixture-of-experts architecture together with model compression and pruning to reduce compute cost while keeping performance. Version 1.0, released in December 2023, handled question answering, semantic understanding, summarisation and decision reasoning. Version 2.0 in July 2024 added multimodal recognition of images and audio. Version 3.0 in October 2025 moved to a lightweight multi-agent design that halved compute consumption compared with the previous version and launched 36 specialised agents for specific farming tasks. The model now covers 90% of agricultural disciplines and 80% of agricultural scenarios and is in pilot application in some regions, serving more than 100,000 farmers. The article gives several examples. Du Lianhui, who farms 600 mu of corn in Shenyang, used the system to bring his management cost down from about 480 yuan per mu in previous years to under 400 yuan per mu in 2025. A smart-breeding agent produced the Yanqi No. 2 lettuce variety grown at a base in Huairou, Beijing, and a policy navigator agent is being trialled in some townships in Heilongjiang to help with frontline policy communication. Wang said agriculture employs nearly 200 million people and that vertical agricultural models will lower the entrepreneurship threshold and technical barriers for new farmers.