Image source: Visual China
When it comes to agriculture, most people's understanding still stays in the impression of soil fertilizer, wind and sun, rain and rain, "facing the loess with your back to the sky" and "relying on the sky to eat". In reality, many fields are already a different story.
A strawberry cooperative in DandongDonggang, in previous years, a couple managed up to 2 greenhouses, but this year, the assistant director of the production department managed 7-8 greenhouses, through smart water and fertilizer, temperature control, plant protection and other strategies, when to fertilize, how much fertilizer, whether it needs to cool or humidify, all handed over to AI.
More than 2600 kilometers away in Kunming Fumin County, "Duoduo Agricultural Research Base", the tomato that should have grown in the summer was not planted until the end of September, through an independent greenhouse and the corresponding environmental control application interface, remotely adjusting the greenhouse growth environment "suitable", to this cold winter waxing moon has been harvested several waves.
With the application of artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies, the historical process of "ancient agriculture" has reached "smart agriculture".
In the Yunnan Duoduo Agricultural Research Base, tomatoes under the fill lights
"Wisdom tomato" was planted in the winter month
As a doctoral student at Zhejiang University, Yang Fengjun's daily life is a bubble laboratory, engaged in the mining of functional genes of wild tomatoes, with a view to improving the existing cultivated edible tomatoes through hybridization or CRISPR gene editing in the future. In September 2021, he went to the field and planted tomatoes as a "new farmer".
This is a 6-month battle, in order to grow high-quality, high-yield tomatoes, Yang Fengjun formed an interdisciplinary team "XiKi Hamato", including a number of data scientists, plant sensor experts, commercial greenhouse operation experts and agricultural Internet of Things experts, and designed a set of "science and technology tomato" technology solutions, covering SAS streamlined soilless cultivation system, agricultural Internet of Things and (zeolite) carbon dioxide enrichment technology.
Some members of the participating team of the 2nd Toto Agricultural Research Technology Competition, Yoshiki Hamato
By the time it really landed, in view of the fact that the glass greenhouse provided by the Duoduo Agricultural Research Base has built a soilless cultivation system of rock wool + coconut bran, which is the most advanced and green and high-yield planting method at present, equipped with water and fertilizer integration devices and various environmental sensors, it can also play a good role, and Xiki Hamato has trimmed the original plan.
It is worth noting that some of its original technical achievements are still retained. According to Zhu Chang'an, a member of the team who is also a doctoral student at Zhejiang University, "The Ros sensor we developed has been well applied this time, and Ros, as a signaling substance, can be transmitted from the stressed parts of the plant to the unconsctioned parts, thereby improving the overall resistance of the plant." The other is the use of endogenous resistance inducers, which can be sprayed on the surface of tomato plants to improve their resistance to environmental stresses. ”
The most important link in exerting subjective initiative is the construction of artificial intelligence tomato growth and development model. The team first formulated a set of environmental control strategies based on the environmental needs of each stage of tomato growth and development obtained from past experience, such as "what time period of day is how much temperature and humidity", "how to heat up and cool down, humidify and reduce humidity", etc., and then compile it into an algorithm to finally form a set of artificial intelligence expert management system.
As a result, the entire plantation is managed automatically. "The links that require human intervention are only agricultural operations such as whole branches and branches, and a team from the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, a cooperative unit, remains in the local area to be responsible; temperature, humidity, water and fertilizer are all controlled remotely, and only one person needs to check the scene through the remote operating system every day." Yang Fengjun said that the team's main job now is to collect data from the system feedback and use it to update the iterative algorithm and further optimize the management model.
As we all know, Yunnan has "eighteen monsters", one of which is "it rains here and sunburns over there". Xi Kami Hamato observed that due to the change of clouds and sunshine, the motor had to start frequently, once the temperature was high, it would open the window or blackout, and once it was low, it had to close the window or open the visor, resulting in very high energy consumption and not conducive to the extension of the service life of greenhouse equipment.
Faced with the problem, they thought of establishing a partnership with a weather service company to get an accurate weather forecast for the next hour, and write the relevant data into the algorithm to plan the changes in the greenhouse in advance and reduce energy consumption.
At present, in the past 4 months, the "smart tomato" remotely controlled by algorithms in Yunnan has harvested three rounds. The average yield per unit area has reached twice that of some team members who use traditional methods to cultivate in Shandong.
Agricultural science development is still facing "landing difficulties"
"Practice is the only test of truth. We would like to see for ourselves the effect of our research results in actual production, and find deficiencies to adjust the research direction. In the process, we can also learn from the advanced experience of other teams at home and abroad, and then absorb and transform to contribute our own programs to the development of mainland facility horticulture. Talking about the original intention of stepping out of the laboratory, Zhu Changan said.
In fact, like several cutting-edge scientific and technological fields, the landing of each agricultural technology must go through a fairly long process, from the initial discovery of problems in production, to theoretical research, technology development, and then to technology landing and application promotion, and then continuous update and iteration.
In Yang Fengjun's view, at present, the development of China's agricultural science and technology has not lacked theoretical research, many universities and research institutes have accumulated a large number of original theories, but also explored some more mature cutting-edge technologies, but these technologies are often difficult to really fall into actual production, which is the biggest problem facing the development of China's agricultural science and technology.
"In the case of soilless cultivation technology, our team has been promoted everywhere, and many farmers at that time showed that they did not understand and accept it - they could not imagine that tomatoes that grow in thick soil on weekdays could be planted on such a little coconut bran."
Xue Min, a team member who works for Shandong Hengshu Frontier Agricultural Development Company, also saw the same problem in the production line. She said that most farmers are still relatively conservative in their cognition and dare not try new things. The industry is working hard to cultivate "bellwethers", through their demonstrations, so that farmers can really see the effect, in order to promote the new technology step by step.
"Therefore, the Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition not only provides a test field for agricultural research scholars, but also a demonstration platform, allowing more farmers to see the progress made in China's agricultural science and technology progress, especially the production results, so as to take the initiative to try and jointly popularize the steps of 'science and technology agriculture'."
According to the Titanium Media App, the "Duoduo Agricultural Research Technology Competition" is an agricultural science and technology innovation competition initiated by Pinduoduo, which aims to arouse the participation of young agricultural science and technology workers around the world, explore more localized food and agricultural solutions, and let more cutting-edge agricultural science and technology go from the laboratory to the field. The competition has been held for two consecutive years.
In July 2020, the first competition launched the strawberry "man-machine war", and finally, young scientists around the world used AI technologies such as crop growth models and convolution algorithms to cultivate "scientific and technological strawberries", which increased by 196.32% compared with traditional planting methods, and the input-output ratio was 75.51% higher than the average of traditional methods.
The first Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition
It is worth mentioning that the winning teams of the first two finalists have begun to explore commercial operations, which is the best witness to the implementation of science and technology. As Chen Lei, chairman and CEO of Pinduoduo, said in an internal speech: "Technology itself is not important, what matters is that technology can land to change something." ”
Hamato participated in the second Toto Agricultural Research Technology Competition, which was launched in September 2021 and is currently in progress. Compared with the previous session, this year has put forward a higher goal - to "plant more" and "plant well". In April 2022, the four finalists will compete in terms of tomato yield, quality, environmental impact, algorithmic strategy, and commercial feasibility.
From the upward movement of agricultural goods to the arrival of science and technology in the countryside
The layout of Pinduoduo and its founding team in agricultural science and technology is far more than that.
As early as March 2021, when Huang Zheng "retired", he announced that he would devote himself to basic research in the field of food science and life sciences. For example, through the control of the planting process of agricultural products, the reliable and effective control of potentially harmful heavy metals such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, etc., and the controllable standardization of their possible and beneficial trace elements are controlled.
By August 2021, Pinduoduo officially set up the "10 Billion Agricultural Research Project", with the new chairman and CEO Chen Lei personally serving as the first position of the project, marking the systematization of its investment in agricultural science and technology. At that time, it announced that it would prioritize the profits of the second quarter and the next few quarters into the project until the 10 billion pool was filled.
After the release of the third quarterly report, Chen Lei further said that Pinduoduo will shift the focus of marketing in the past 5 years to research and development, and use Pinduoduo's advantages in technology to further promote the digitalization of agriculture.
Specific to practice, in recent years, in addition to the "Duoduo Agricultural Research And Technology Competition", Pinduoduo has also joined hands with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and Zhejiang University to launch the "Global Agricultural Maker Competition", and the United Nations Domestic Industry, Education and Research Institutions have hosted the "First China Agricultural Robot Innovation Competition".
In fact, relying on agricultural products, Pinduoduo has always taken agriculture as its core strategy, but its contribution to the agricultural field in the past few years has mainly been in the circulation field - "by improving the efficiency of the circulation field and optimizing the middle to make up for the two ends, to benefit farmers and consumers." ”
At the beginning of its establishment, Pinduoduo broke the traditional e-commerce business sales model, but used the "spelling" model to gather the original extremely scattered needs in time and space into a relatively concentrated order, and then through the "goods to find people" model, the supply and demand ends of the docking, running out of a new e-commerce model for agricultural products, so that agricultural products in poor areas break through the restrictions of the traditional circulation model and directly connect to the national market.
In the past 5 years, the turnover of Pinduoduo agricultural products has maintained a rapid growth rate of about 100% per year. According to the financial report, from 2018 to 2020, the GMV of its agricultural products was 65.3 billion yuan, 136.3 billion yuan and 270 billion yuan, respectively; in the first half of 2021, the order volume of its agricultural (sideline) products rose by 431% year-on-year, which is still far higher than the growth rate of revenue, users and GMV.
"But the improvement of circulation efficiency, after all, can not qualitatively enhance the added value of agricultural products, nor can it greatly improve the level of physical health." Therefore, as Chen Lei, who came from a technical background, "took over the baton", Pinduoduo went deeper into the agricultural reform and turned to science and technology-driven in an all-round way.
It can be imagined that with technology to empower the upstream links of the industrial chain such as agricultural product cultivation, planting, storage, and logistics, users and farmers at both ends of the platform will benefit - farmers grow better products and obtain higher added value; in the process of promoting the upward movement of agricultural products in the follow-up, users will also buy better products. This will also become the core competitiveness of Pinduoduo in this field.
In the longer term, Pinduoduo has completed the digitization of circulation links on the one hand, and on the other hand, it has explored the digital improvement of production and planting in the upstream, and will build a set of digital agriculture middle platforms including production, consumption, circulation chains, etc., open up the digital chain from circulation to production, provide solutions, and promote the landing of digital agriculture in a wider range.
brief summary
In recent years, all walks of life in China have experienced the baptism of digital transformation, and agriculture and science and technology are also moving towards integrated development, but the degree of digitization in the agricultural field has been low, and the large-scale landing of digital agriculture still has a long way to go.
Pinduoduo, which has both Internet technology genes and agricultural genes, while exerting efforts in supply chain and sales, while sparing no expense in scientific research, just made a profit for two consecutive quarters to smash all profits into it, showing long-term determination and persistence.
It can also be seen that from planting to circulation to consumption, the internet is gradually deepening the transformation of the whole chain of the agricultural industry chain.
(This article was first published on titanium media App, author | Liu Mengmeng)