Chongqing- Chongqing has developed a digital management platform for a provincial-level agricultural industry that has enabled remote intelligent identification and extraction of significant grain and oil crops such as rice, corn, canola, and tea. 

Chongqing covers a large area crisscrossed by rivers and mountains. "We developed the unmanned orchard digital platform for the first time in the western mountainous, hilly regions," said Zhou Rui, an official of Chongqing Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Mainly for mountain agricultural parks or industrial bases, the platform allows for accurate digital management of the production process, from intelligent site selection to garden construction and so on. 

Technology is applied in agriculture, which enhances the efficiency of plant protection. (iChongqing file photo)

Themed on innovative seedling factory projects, smart agriculture, rural revitalization, and other related topics, several experts from the Chongqing Academy of Agricultural Sciences shared their insights at the meeting held online by the Smart Roadshow International News Center recently.

Save more than 80% of the labor

Chongqing Academy of Agricultural Sciences has developed an integrated solution for aquaponics intelligent factory technical equipment after years of research, according to Liu Jizhen, researcher and deputy director of the industrial development department.

Aquaponics refers to a system of aquaculture in which the waste produced by farmed fish or other aquatic animals supplies nutrients for plants grown hydroponically, which in turn purifies the water.

Using the solution, nitrogen fertilizer can be completely substituted for planting and breeding in vegetable cultivation, saving more than 50% of water and fertilizer and 80% of labor. The project has now been promoted and implemented with a contract value of 50 million yuan for results transformation.

Digital twin platform of intelligent seeding plant in Xinglong Town, Yubei District. (Photo provided to iChongqing)

Furthermore, Liu proposed the concepts of a map, a platform, and a network to create a digital closed loop of modern mountain-featured agriculture from pre-production, mid-production, and post-production.

Specifically, this map depicts the first in the country to draw a large-scale digital map of the province and to create a digital platform for agricultural monitoring in Chongqing, with precise geographical information available for each pilot. The platform refers to the mountain orchard intelligent management platform, with the rate of first-class fruit growing by 40%. The network is an e-commerce platform dedicated to revitalizing rural areas, with a cumulative transaction amount of more than 100 million yuan.

Digital twin management platform for vegetable seedlings

With a yearly output of 150 million high-quality seedlings, the intelligent seedling plant in Xinglong Town, Yubei District of Chongqing, mainly produces vegetable seedlings in the factory to supply 80% of the vegetable seedling market demand within the district. 

"By building a digital twin management platform, we connected the existing equipment according to standard communication protocols and realized unified, centralized data collection and management," said Zheng Jishu, deputy director of the institute of agricultural engineering, Chongqing Academy of Agricultural Sciences. 

In the vegetable sowing link, automatic operations such as substrate unsealing, substrate mixing, and automatic stacking of seedling trays are realized, saving more than two laborers in this part.

Meanwhile, a production traceability system has been built which adopts on-site real-time entry and realizes the collection of traceability information such as personnel, time, and weather in each step. Users can view the data in the seedling production process by scanning the quick response (QR) code.