Due to the constraints of agricultural production conditions, such as regional differences, variety of crop types and planting patterns, agricultural machinery needs to meet the requirements of multi-functional, small batch, customization and diversification of customers’ needs. At present, all of Chinese agricultural machine enterprises generally focus on tracking and copying foreign agricultural machinery product, which lead to problems such as long development cycle, low efficiency of design knowledge reuse, and poor product reliability. The low competitiveness of products and lack of core independent technologies have bottlenecked the sustainable development of agricultural machine enterprises in China. To meet the diversified needs of users as the goal, intelligent design technology with knowledge based engineering (KBE), data management (DM), artificial intelligence (AI), virtual simulation technology and other modern information technology as means, the synergistic, automatic and intelligent design of agricultural machinery can be realized by integrating existing resources of related enterprises in the whole life cycle of agricultural machinery and product data management/product lifecycle management (PDM/PLM) collaborative design platform. It’s the key to improve the design level of agricultural machinery in China. Based on the characteristics of agricultural machinery, the definition, technical system, key technology and development status of intelligent design technology for agricultural machinery were introduced. The current situation and future development trends of the key technologies in intelligent design technology for agricultural machinery such as computer aided design (CAD), modular design, knowledge based engineering, virtual simulation, PDM/PLM collaborative design were deeply analyzed in recent years. And the reference suggestions for the research direction of agricultural machinery design were put forward.