Abstract: In recent years, China has introduced a number of measures to vigorously promote the development of digital intelligent agriculture. For example, in 2020, No.1 central document emphasizes the need to strengthen the construction of modern agricultural facilities and carry out the national digital rural pilot project. The digital agriculture development plan (2019-2025 years) also calls for the development of digital agriculture. In addition, some data show that the potential market size of China’s digital agriculture is expected to increase from 13.7 billion dollars in 2015 to 26.8 billion dollars in 2020. Under the dual guidance of national policies and market prospects, many industry giants, such as Alibaba, Jingdong, Country garden, Evergrande group, have laid out the “blue ocean” of agriculture. However, due to the fact that China’s digital agriculture is still in its infancy and the barriers to digital technology are high, the purchase costs and R&D (research and development) investments of relevant technologies and equipment remain high. In 2018, Jingdong Group invested 12.1 billion yuan in technology R&D; to fully realize artificial intelligence pig raising, Alibaba cloud invested hundreds of millions of yuan in targeted training and R&D of ET brain in 2018. The high costs of digitization are bound to reduce the investment enthusiasm of small and medium-sized farms, especially those with insufficient funds, which will affect the long-term development of agricultural digitization. Meanwhile, the contract consciousness of enterprises and farms is relatively weak, and the default rate of order agriculture is high, which also hinders the sustainable development of modern agricultural supply chain.

Key words: agricultural digital technology; investment cost; supply chain robustness; vertical shareholding strategy; agricultural supply chain coordination