Abstract: Chinese agriculture is facing increasing challenges: the constraints of resources and the environment is increasingly tightening, the price difference between domestic and international markets is enlarging, and the growth in agriculture output and farmers' income is becoming hard to achiere. So, Chinese agriculture has a urgent need of transformation and upgrading, optimizing the structure and improving the quality and efficiency. Big data, as a strategic resource such as material and energy, which plays an important role in the production factors coupling, collaboration, and other aspects of agricultural systems, is becoming an important driving power of agricultural modernization development. At present, big data technology has made progress in agricultural information acquisition, analysis, processing, services, and application in the precise production decision, food security, mining consumer’s demand, guide trade and market. Facing the difficulties of agriculture transformation and upgrading, both of technology innovation and organization innovation need to be formed. On the one hand, developing a data cross fusion, laying solid foundation of modern agricultural benchmark data, breaking an agricultural intelligent model analysis processing system and development and promoting the continuous innovation in data service; On the other hand, setting up data consciousness, strengthening legislation, and improving the governance structure on top of the data, in particular, to deal with data security and data sharing.

Key words: big data, modern agriculture, transformation and upgrading, application