Inside Chongqing’s Canola Sea: A Spring Hotspot Where Smart Farming Meets Tourism and Income

Chongqing - On March 24, Bridging News visited Xiushan in Chongqing, where more than 20 million square meters of canola in bloom have turned the area into a popular spring destination, helping farmers earn from both tourism and oil production, with smart technology supporting better crop quality and efficiency.

Canola is a key cash crop, with its seeds processed into rapeseed oil, a staple in Chinese households, giving it value beyond its visual appeal. Its dual role as both an agricultural product and a scenic attraction has helped make canola bloom a growing source of income, combining farming with tourism for local farmers.

According to grower Yu Zhixiang, the peak bloom runs from late February or early March to mid- or late April, attracting large numbers of visitors. During this period alone, he earns a net income of about 7,000 to 8,000 yuan (approx. 1,015–1,160 U.S. dollars) from selling local specialty products near the fields.

After the bloom, rapeseeds can be sold or processed into oil. From his 3,333 square meters of canola, Yu can press oil to sell at 14 yuan per 500 grams or sell the harvest to larger operators, ensuring a stable income that balances tourism with farming.

Whether maximizing tourism appeal or ensuring strong yields, planting scale and crop health are the foundation. Large-scale farming requires precise management, but traditional manual inspections are inefficient and lack full coverage, making it hard to monitor overall field conditions. Uneven crop growth can go unnoticed, affecting both the landscape and the harvest.

To address the inefficiencies and inaccuracies of manual patrols, Xiushan has introduced drones equipped with hyperspectral and multispectral cameras to manage its large-scale canola operations.

Yang Yi, Assistant Researcher of the Farming, Cultivation, and Comprehensive Utilization Team at the Chongqing Academy of Agricultural Sciences, explained the technology's core mechanics. The specialized drone cameras capture specific light wavelengths; the health of the canola plants directly dictates how they absorb and reflect these specific bands of light.

"It’s like a patient getting a CT scan at a hospital; the drone acts as diagnostic equipment for the farmland," Yang said. The drones capture field imagery based on programmed flight paths. Backend algorithms then analyze the spectral data to calculate a health index and generate visual maps. The depth of color on these maps intuitively displays crop health.

The system records the GPS coordinates of underperforming areas and sends this precise data to agricultural equipment such as crop-spraying drones. This enables targeted, variable-rate application of fertilizers and pesticides instead of the traditional method of spraying entire fields. According to Yang, this approach reduces fertilizer and pesticide use by about 60% compared with conventional methods.

Replacing manual patrols with drones boosts inspection efficiency across fields, Yang added. It eliminates the misjudgments caused by "edge effects"—where farmers manually inspect only the easily accessible perimeters of the fields. While on-site displays provide rapid preliminary monitoring, Yang noted that for highly precise growth metrics and professional analysis, the image data is sent back to servers for advanced computing and deeper research.

Xiushan is located in southeastern Chongqing, near the borders of Hunan and Guizhou provinces, and is part of the Xiushan Tujia and Miao Autonomous County. The area benefits from a mild subtropical monsoon climate with warm winters, ample rainfall, and good sunlight, along with well-drained hilly terrain, all of which support canola growth and spring blooming after autumn planting.