(Economic Observation) What will China's digital agriculture look like in the future when over 2 million farmers' cooperatives transform?
China News Agency, Beijing, July 6th (Xia Bin) Passion fruit produced in Guangxi will be sent to the sorting line before shipment. Just like CT inspection, the photoelectric sorter can detect the acid of each one. Sweetness, smoothness of fruit surface, whether there are mold spots, scratches, etc. As for the diameter of the fruit, it can be more accurate to millimeters, and the weight is accurate to 0.5 grams.
The above scene is happening at the Alibaba Digital Agriculture Consolidation and Processing Center (hereinafter referred to as the “origin warehouse”) built in Nanning. The control of the quality of agricultural products is crucial, and the digital production warehouse is improving efficiency. Skilled workers can sort up to 450 kg of fruit a day, and the sorting line can classify 7 tons of fruit in one hour. The efficiency is the former 124 times.
In addition, the transition from agricultural products to commodities involves many processes such as sorting, quality control, packing, and ordering. The digitized and automated warehouse of origin can complete this series of processes in only two minutes.
The overall supply chain of Chinese agriculture is being reshaped by digital technology. Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China and Alibaba signed a strategic cooperation agreement on agricultural assistance. Among them, the most important cooperation content is to allow farmers' cooperatives' agricultural products to be sold in the Alibaba economy, so that small farmers can connect to the big market, and the cooperatives' digital transformation and upgrading.
Statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs show that there are currently more than 2 million farmer cooperatives in China, radiating nearly half of the farmers in the country. These cooperatives mainly produce agricultural products such as grain, cotton, oil, meat, egg milk, fruit, vegetable and tea. This means that more than 2 million farmer cooperatives will catch the "Digital Express".
What will China's digital agriculture look like in the future? The “Digital Agriculture and Rural Development Plan (2019-2025)” officially released earlier this year clearly proposed strengthening digital production capacity and accelerating the digital transformation of agricultural and rural production operations and management services.
"Digital agriculture is another revolution in agriculture." Zhao Chunjiang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the National Agricultural Informatization Engineering Technology Research Center, believes that digital agriculture is formed by the development of modern agriculture using modern industrial production organization methods, management concepts and advanced technologies. A new agricultural format, characterized by "information + knowledge + intelligent equipment", is fundamentally different from traditional agriculture with "land + machinery" at its core.
He further stated that due to the involvement of information and knowledge as factors of production, digital agriculture has multiplied production efficiency, realized industrial structure upgrades, industrial organization optimization and industrial innovation methods, enhanced the overall quality of the agricultural industry, agricultural benefits and competitiveness, and improved resources Utilization rate, labor productivity and management efficiency.
Alibaba Vice President and President of the Digital Agriculture Division Hou Yi took the Hubei Zigui Navel Orange Digital Agriculture Base as an example to describe the appearance of digital agriculture in detail: in production, all indicators have quantitative data, and the orange garden is selected below 300 meters above sea level It must be sunny, and the spacing between the orchard plants is accurate to centimeters, while the aerial protection drone spraying pesticides can also be accurate to the centimeter level.
At the same time, an intelligent weather station is set up in the agricultural base, and data is collected by sensors and AI chips to monitor sunshine, temperature, and humidity at any time; the integrated water and fertilizer drip irrigation system ensures that the fertilizer obtained by each orange tree throughout the year is accurate to 100 grams. Big data can even help fruit farmers determine that there can be 50 to 55 leaves near each fruit.
Zhang Hong, Dean of the Western Digital Economic Research Institute of Xi'an University of Posts and Telecommunications, bluntly stated that the new digital agriculture infrastructure is particularly critical. It is necessary to grasp the massive data resources of agricultural digital big data to provide information content for agricultural and rural production and service decisions; grasping the networked 5G technology can improve the speed of information transmission and provide technical support for data transmission.
"After the epidemic, as an important part of the "new infrastructure", the construction of digital agricultural infrastructure will definitely increase investment and speed up the construction, which will provide a "new base" of "plug and play" for the future development of agricultural and rural modernization. "Hou Yi said.
He emphasized that in the long run, rural digitalization is another new engine that will fully Internetize the agricultural industry and the entire consumption chain. Empower rural economic development and government administrative supervision; empower rural grassroots governance and farmers' participation; and benefit farmers from the perspective of rural public services. China's future will also move from a big agricultural country to a big digital agricultural country. (Finish)