How can agriculture and rural areas achieve high-quality development empowered by smart technology and digitalization?
The Smart Agriculture Forum is held in Chongqing as a part of the 2021 Smart China Expo on August 23, 2021. (Photo/ Smart Roadshow News Center)
The Smart Agriculture Forum was held in Chongqing as a part of the 2021 Smart China Expo on August 23. At the forum themed with Smart Agriculture Boosts Rural Rejuvenation, government officials, experts, scholars, and representatives of well-known enterprises discussed the development model of smart agriculture. They exchanged successful experiences in the development of smart agriculture.
Industry heavyweights like Tang Ke, director of the Department of Market and Information Technology of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Zhao Chunjiang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, director of the National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, and Li Daoliang, professor of China Agricultural University and director of the National Digital Fisheries Innovation Center, attended the forum online or offline and shared their views.
Participants of the Smart Agriculture Forum held in Chongqing on August 23, 2021. (Photo Smart Roadshow News Center)
Focusing on the topic of Agricultural and Rural Informatization Boosts Rural Rejuvenation, Tang Ke stated through a video call that at the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), over 98% of Chinese administrative villages had access to optical fiber and 4G communication, making China lead the world in the network coverage of rural areas.
China has made solid progress in the smart development of agricultural production. A series of projects such as digital agriculture pilot projects and precision agriculture applications have been carried out to promote the application of new-generation information technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data, AI, and robots in agricultural production and operation.
E-commerce has gained ground in the development of the rural digital economy. E-commerce shopping festivals, forums, and other activities have been launched across the country to optimize and upgrade the industrial chain and supply chain. Agricultural products and e-commerce have also become an attention grabber for agricultural and rural entrepreneurship. Data shows that the rural information service system has basically covered the whole country. A total of 454,000 agricultural information cooperatives have been built across the country, covering 80% of administrative villages.
In addition, the new business form of "Internet plus" has greatly improved the efficiency of government administration.
"Nevertheless, agricultural and rural informatization still faces many challenges. Integrating information technology and agriculture develops in breadth and depth toward intelligence, synergy, and whole-process coverage." Tang Ke said that in order to acclimate the development trends and secure all-around progress, efforts should be made in four aspects: building agricultural and rural big data systems, enhancing digital productivity, accelerating rural digitalization, and promoting the innovation of smart agricultural technologies.
Zhao Chunjiang talked about smart agriculture from the perspective of system engineering and shared that smart agriculture is an irresistible trend. Considering that it is centered on information and knowledge, more modern information technologies and intelligent equipment should be used.
As smart agriculture booms, big data technology is applied in the entire agricultural industry chain, and the machine is rapidly replacing the workforce.
Looking ahead, smart agriculture will become a worldwide focus. Zhao Chunjiang said that China should intensify its efforts to develop modern technologies and advance agricultural reform to ensure high-quality development.
Li Daoliang shared his views on Unmanned Farming Leads the Development of China's Smart Agriculture. He said that Chinese agriculture faces such problems as small-scale production, poor organization, low labor productivity, low utilization of resources, sharply rising labor costs, and an aging population.
As for the future pattern of agriculture, Li Daoliang said that advances in information technology are accelerating the machine replacement of the workforce, making unmanned farming an irresistible trend.
In recent years, agriculture has been transformed from smallholder production, mechanized production, intelligent production to unmanned production. "Unmanned production, in general, means that without people on the farm, all the operations are done by machine." Li Daoliang said that the form of unmanned farming varies among different application scenarios. The unmanned farming system mainly includes a technical facility system, operation equipment system, measurement and control system, and management cloud platform system.
How to further develop unmanned farming? Li Daoliang said that China should advance the research on new-generation information technologies, encourage large enterprises to drive industrial development, build agriculture 4.0 industry ecosystem, cultivate information talent, and promote modern agriculture to fuel developing smart agriculture.
At the forum, Cao Bangxing, Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Wushan County Committee, said, "Technological innovation is the route we must take to drive agricultural modernization." Wushan cooperates with universities and research institutes inside and outside the city to improve its scientific research capabilities and cultivate more high-quality, high-yield, and disease-resistant varieties that drive the development of mountain agriculture.
Moreover, the digital orchard platform will ensure unified management. The big data platform of the whole industry chain helps to grasp the real-time situation of production and sales and conduct the orchard management online, including plant disease and insect pest control. Currently, Wushan has 1,542 planting entities on the digital orchard platform.
Digitalization has become an important enabler for all-around rural revitalization.
Wang Fang pointed out that with the in-depth application of new-generation information technologies such as AI, the Internet of Things, and big data, digitalization has gradually been integrated into the planning and implementation of rural revitalization.
As rural revitalization advances, new-generation information technology enterprises contribute to the modernization of agriculture and rural areas based on their own advantages. Inspur demonstrates advantages in information infrastructure construction, digital platform construction, data governance, and integrating schemes and construction, management, operation, and services for rural revitalization. With these advantages, Inspur is committed to boosting agricultural development, enhancing rural governance, and offering services for people's benefit, Wang said.
"Today, I would like to share with you the story of a small orchard. Although this small orchard only has an area of 133.3 hectares, it is the first digital unmanned orchard in the hilly and mountainous region of China." Yang Hong, Deputy Director of Chongqing Agriculture and Rural Committee, gave a speech titled "The Digital Unmanned Orchard in the Hills," sharing the results of Chongqing's pilot project of building a modern unmanned orchard in the hilly and mountainous region.
How does the unmanned orchard work? What are the differences between unmanned orchards and traditional orchards? Yang Hong introduced that around intelligent identification, diagnosis, and decision-making. Chongqing applies technological achievements like AI identification, agricultural remote sensing, and intelligent machines to build a "1+4" mode: a data center integrating orchard environmental monitoring, precise management, remote monitoring, and intelligent agricultural machinery.
The unmanned orchard can ensure full-coverage, all-weather, whole-process, and full-automatic operation.
"Compared with plains, it is quite difficult to realize unmanned management in hilly areas. In the construction of the unmanned orchard, Chongqing has addressed the challenges in precise algorithms, intelligent agricultural machinery, and system integration." He said that the unmanned orchard has achieved the remodeling of traditional productivity and production relations, greatly improved productivity and production efficiency, and realized "intensive, efficient, safe and controllable operation based on existing advantages."
The unmanned orchard represents a bold attempt and is a major breakthrough made by Chongqing.
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