The autumn sun and temperature of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau are falling exceptionally fast. When the chill began to sink into the soil, the farmers bowed, carried sacks stuffed with buds, crossed slope paths, handed the weight to the horses, and descended home. At this time, Yang Ruimei will see the Jianchuan Dam under the sunset, which is pale and yellow. This is a deep, tragic undertone unique to agriculture and villages. She thought, she was going to get out of the dam.
In the past decade, Yang Ruimei walked out of the dam, but never left agriculture. She, as well as everyone who participated in the Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition, used their own good planting, energy, algorithms, engineering and other means to live like crops, meditate like land, and try to find answers about the land, about crops, and about the future of farmers.
"The barrier is thicker"
The prerequisite for finding answers is that you know what the problem is. In the field of scientific research, finding problems is also a problem. They are always calmly hidden under all appearances, you have to be patient, you have to have the inevitability of a blow.
Zheng Jianfeng had such an inevitability. He comes from the Key Laboratory of Facility Agricultural Engineering of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China Agricultural University, and this time led the CyberFarmer team to the final of the 3rd Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition. They were also the champions of the AI category of the first Duoduo Agricultural Research and Technology Competition, which nearly doubled their strawberry production through AI planting.
Strawberries are one of Zheng's most familiar crops. Five years ago, he chose the doctoral topic of "Seedling and Cultivation of Strawberries in Plant Factories," which was a relatively cutting-edge topic at the time and was also being explored in Japan and Korea.
He first encountered problems with seedlings. After the seedlings on the market are transplanted to plant factories, they are not easy to survive, and there are many diseases, "one is not standardized, the other is that the technology is not perfect, and the quality is very unstable." Zheng Jianfeng learned to produce disease-free seedlings through tissue culture.
Seedling breeding is also a problem, borrowing from Korean technology? In the plant factory, the creeping stems are pressed into the seedling substrate and wait for it to take root and become seedlings, but they are weak and uneven in size. Zheng Jianfeng took a different approach, cutting the seedlings at the tip of the creeping stem, and concentrated them on cuttings to the plant factory, and the seedlings grew strong and of the same size.
A year later, Zheng Jianfeng decided to turn to solving the problem of high-quality breeding of strawberry seedlings. "The problem of seedlings is not something I will encounter alone, it is a problem of the industry, and sooner or later it will break out." He wanted to find a way out.
The CyberFarmer team are all young scientists from the Key Laboratory of Facility Agricultural Engineering of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China Agricultural University.
To solve the problem, you need to read the crop. Zheng Jianfeng lives like a crop, staying in a laboratory with a temperature of 25°C and a humidity of 70% all day long, building experimental devices, breeding seedlings, collecting experimental data, and so on in the noise of the rumbling fan. He didn't have winter and summer vacations, and even if he went home for the New Year, he would rush back - solve problems before they appeared.
But in agriculture, or in all industries, the problems never end, they need answers that are both needed, wanted, and wanted, and those answers are always temporary.
Zhu Weimin has a deep understanding of this. He is the director of the Institute of Horticulture of the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences and a judge of the Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition. He has been looking for answers since he entered agronomy in 1987 and began researching new tomato variety selection and facility cultivation techniques in 1997.
Zhu Weimin's research group was the first to study tomato breeding in China, with a history of 60 years, and he is now in his third generation. They understand the different needs of the public for tomatoes at each stage, and strive to make the cultivated tomatoes meet this expectation: not only good seedlings, but also disease resistance, good and delicious fruit, and high yield; It can be planted in a field or lived in a greenhouse; Can grow happily in the humid and hot Shanghai, can also fearlessly live in dry Yunnan and Xinjiang with large temperature differences between day and night...
Zhu Weimin, who used to sweat in the fields, now struggles to read crops in a plant factory. He believes that smart agriculture first solves the problem of environmental control, calculates the energy changes of light entering the environment, and adjusts the environment to a state suitable for plant growth in a timely manner. This is not something that can be solved by the discipline of agriculture alone, but "traditional disciplines are very divided and the barriers between each other are thick."
He was very happy to see that in the Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition, "those engaged in agriculture, informationization, energy, and equipment got together to figure out how to grow more and more delicious vegetables." "Only in this way can agriculture be truly modernized." Now we don't have enough equipment, technology and control systems to make it happen. I'm sure these questions will find answers when I retire. ”
Answers and solution ideas
The search for answers is not about surviving on an island, but about the stars. Smart agriculture is mostly considered to be "a multidisciplinary application scenario that integrates agricultural planting, artificial intelligence, digital technology, mechanical engineering, energy and power, etc." This definition determines how agriculture will be transformed.
This is the mission of the Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition. Since 2020, Pinduoduo has led the Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition for three consecutive years, bringing together scientists and top farmers to use artificial intelligence, digital technology, synthetic biology and other technologies to grow strawberries, tomatoes and lettuce with higher yields and better quality with lower energy consumption and shorter cycles. They hope that this small step in the experimental field will become a big step in agricultural modernization.
In the next three months, the four teams that have reached the finals of the Duoduo Agricultural Research Competition will be challenged to grow higher yields and better quality lettuce with lower energy consumption and shorter cycle times in container vertical farms.
This is also the reason why scientists from various fields rush to the competition. Xu Dan, the captain of the LettUs Grow team who participated in the Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition for two consecutive years, was once "skeptical" about artificial intelligence and algorithms. In the past two years, he has organized a group of data scientists who do not understand agriculture and agronomists who do not understand code to sit together, teach computers to grow vegetables, and compete with other teams in the Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition.
He had the opportunity to learn about institutions at the forefront of smart agriculture research, and "you are unlikely to let Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and China Agricultural University do the same problem as you." And now, he can not only see other people's answers, but also sort out the other party's problem-solving ideas.
The solution idea of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University team is to achieve maximum production capacity with minimum energy consumption. This line of thinking depends on the leader Bao Hua, who has been working in energy and power engineering for many years. He believes that in the process of converting natural light to artificial light, energy efficiency will definitely decrease, which is the reason for the huge energy consumption of plant factories and the biggest development bottleneck.
Zha Lingyan, a doctor of agronomy who has cooperated with Bao Hua for three years, sees the limitations of traditional agronomic research: "Most of the agricultural research is from the perspective of plants to improve their growth efficiency, and often lacks the vision to solve agricultural problems from the aspects of energy and heat, mechanical engineering. "Smart agriculture requires "otherness thinking."
Lin Tong and Dai Changjun from Lettus Grow's team are the "other", data scientists at Bayer CropScience's Asia Pacific Digital Farming Incubator. Previously, they had never thought that algorithms could be related to agriculture, and they had many options outside of agriculture.
Dai Changjun can foresee, "In a big factory, I will do the same work as others." However, I don't know my knowledge of algorithms and methods of data processing, in what way it acts on agriculture. It was novel, and he was sure that this was the direction of agriculture.
The LettUs Grow team is a team of interdisciplinary and multi-field innovators from agricultural research institutions, agricultural planting enterprises, digital agricultural enterprises and so on.
However, "the concepts and technologies of the Internet of Things, big data, and blockchain are too far away from the planting scene and agricultural products, and they are also very lofty in the air", so for a long time, forest children lived with crops, observed changes, collected data, and then built algorithmic models.
The model can identify through pictures which growth stage the tomatoes are in and how long it is until maturity. Of course, this is a long and cumbersome design and verification process.
First, you have to build a tomato ripeness model. Botanists provide information on which colors tomatoes are underripe, half-ripe and mature, and then data scientists manually label these states on tomato pictures, and then use these pictures to train the model to learn the tomato information, "just like telling children to know something."
From recognition to recognition, it takes repeated training and correction. After the model recognizes tomatoes, the data scientist will conduct multiple "exams" of the model, upload different tomato photos, and the model outputs the corresponding tomato information to determine their maturity status. They will modify the model according to the "answer sheet" until the model reaches a high recognition accuracy.
In the gradual transformation of tomatoes from green to red, the model shows subtle insight and predictive ability, judging the ripening cycle of each tomato, and how much yield is in this week or the next. Such prophets are extremely important in an agriculture that is full of elasticity and unknown change, but also seeks to modernize change.
Different paths of evolution
Solving resilience and the unknown is the biggest problem faced by all those who participate in the Duoduo Agricultural Research Competition, as well as all those engaged in agriculture. That's where agriculture is fascinating.
In Bao Hua's engineering research experience, the environment or things he faces are often controllable, and the collection of enough data and the setting of procedures can be accurately produced. But the crop is different, it is alive and elusive, it stands silently in the soil, in the vessel.
The agricultural scene is the most fixed. But in fact, for crops, they only care that the energy must come, and it does not matter where it comes from. Bao Huacha has an extraordinary ability to capture energy, and in 2020 he began to apply energy technology to plant cultivation, starting the Deep Blue Project.
The team of Shanghai Jiao Tong University gathers the research strength of agricultural engineering, energy utilization, mechanical engineering, computer science and other interdisciplinary disciplines of agriculture and industry.
His gaze was set on the sea, where there was no soil, no fresh water, and for land crops, it was a dead land, but the sun was warm. Bao Hua led the team to grow lettuce in the form of floating board hydroponics, and then use solar power to produce fresh water to realize the conversion and supply of energy required for lettuce.
Asking for land from the ocean and energy from the sun is an imaginative thing. Imagination is a scarce commodity in empirical agriculture, or rather a scarcity in that it is extremely difficult to detect.
For He Lizhong, there is nothing new in the crop field, he is all too familiar with this place. He Lizhong is the leader of the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences team, a team participating in the Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition. After graduation, he entered the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences to study plant factory cultivation technology. He understands the characteristics of plants and knows what they are afraid of.
Adversity stress was the main direction of Dr. He Lizhong's period: "Put the plant in an environment it does not like, see what changes will happen to it, where its limits are, and whether there is a way to alleviate it." Appropriate coercion may trigger "adversity," similar to leafy greens that have survived frost, or tomatoes grown at moderately high concentrations of nutrient solutions.
After reading a flood report, He Lizhong thought: "Can we look at the state of crops under low oxygen stress?" He Zhongzhong has studied hydroponics, plant roots soaked in nutrient solution, to ensure root respiration is particularly important, if long-term hypoxia or even hypoxia, it will cause irreversible damage, or death.
In the experiment, when the plant was on the verge of death, he observed the changes of the plant by applying exogenous relieving agents such as plant growth regulators and plant hormones, and whether it could survive the damage of hypoxia or even recover. "It may be like people, when they reach a desperate situation, as long as there is a little opportunity, they will stimulate the desire to survive and Jedi will fight back."
And the vitality of plants is far beyond people. He Lizhong's research has just begun, and "the results need to be repeatedly verified." The final result of scientific research is not to be put on the shelf, but into practice. So, it requires imagination as well as pragmatism.
The team of the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences has rich theoretical and practical experience in facility cultivation and smart agriculture, and has provided vegetable planting training for mainland Antarctic scientific expedition members in extreme environments.
"Pragmatism" is the "soul" of the CyberFarmer team, and their mentor, He Dongxian, a professor at China Agricultural University, repeatedly said: "What industrial problems to solve?" Can it be applied? Think clearly and study again. ”
Yang Hao's doctoral research direction is based on the intelligent control of plant physiological feedback, in layman's terms, it is to dynamically and continuously monitor the assimilation amount of plant factories, that is, the process of plants absorbing carbon dioxide and accumulating to form organic matter. However, in the real world, it is difficult to operate: "Will the external environment and even the plant factory building itself contaminate the data?" Can the number of air changes between the factory and the outside world be stably collected? How to achieve dynamic continuous monitoring? ”
The technology developed by foreign agronomists around plant phenotyping is not uncommon, and it can be observed through hyperspectral and high-throughput cameras, monitoring plant structure, growth and development process, and so on. However, such cameras "cost more than 500,000 at the cheapest and millions at the more expensive." ”
Young scientists at China Agricultural University wanted to use a relatively simple and inexpensive method to implement a dynamic continuous monitoring photosynthetic system to adapt to the characteristics of China's smallholder economy. They believe that the ultimate goal of research is still to apply to production, "increasing crop yields and reducing production costs, which is the key."
In this Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition, they will apply the dynamic continuous monitoring photosynthetic system to lettuce planting. They have successfully applied the dynamic nutrient solution formulation technology verified by the first Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition in the strawberry greenhouse of the Xiaotangshan Modern Agricultural Science and Technology Demonstration Park in Beijing.
This is just the first step. Agricultural research is a practical, applied science, where all problems are real, and without solutions, there is no evolution.
Hand in hand and hard at the same time
In the ten years since Yang Ruimei left, many changes have taken place in Jianchuan Dam, but the changes in agriculture have been the slowest and stagnant. Farmers still follow the season, brave the scorching sun, wind and rain, sow seeds, lay seedlings and harvest. It's just that the mountain road is a little better, and the horses have been replaced with tricycles.
Yang Ruimei, a member of the CyberFarmer team and a doctor from China Agricultural University, still can't avoid being asked: "After being admitted to university and going to Beijing, how can you still farm?" ”
How do you still farm? Everyone has their own answer.
Usually in about 35 days, a lettuce can grow from the seed to maturity. The lettuce variety in the picture is "elegant".
Yang Ruimei wants to do a lot. The more familiar you are with agriculture, the more you want to change it, and this road is no easier than farming in the Jianchuan Dam. She studied agricultural engineering during her undergraduate and master's degrees, and her research direction was physiological information detection of hydroponic lettuce during her doctoral studies. She wanted to capture what happens to a lettuce in the ever-changing light, temperature, fertilizer, water and soil, which farmers in Jianchuan Dam face every day. She wanted to develop equipment that would be simple and less expensive to cultivate, fertilize or harvest instead of farmers. She also knows that these need to be inspired and nurtured, and the process will be long.
Wang Hong, Ph.D. of the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences, has a unique understanding of light. Her PhD was a study of LED lamp horticultural lighting applications, which a decade ago were rare. She carries the instrument every day and repeatedly measures light in different environments and at different times, looking for the law of light and plant growth. In the closed greenhouse, blue and red light flashed in front of my eyes, "I am very lonely, I feel that my research is far from application, and I don't know when I can study it." After publishing the research results, a well-known company followed the paper and collaborated with the school on a lighting project. Now there are more and more LED lights shining on plants. It's been a long process, but there are traces to every step forward.
Unlike researchers who specialize in agriculture, Bao Hua feels that agriculture is just an application scenario, and he is proficient in conducting convective radiation, which is available in mobile phones, buildings, and agriculture; The technology that helps dissipate heat from electronic devices can be used in the production workshop of mobile phones and in the greenhouse where lettuce is grown. He prefers to call this exploration "exploring the way for agriculture": "You find 100 directions, and only 1 direction can grow, but that doesn't mean that 99 directions are meaningless." "The resulting spillover technologies can not only be applied to agriculture, or they may not be used in agriculture temporarily." However, research has always been about preparing for the future.
All techniques return to the "Tao". This is also the reason why they use their own good planting, energy, algorithms, engineering and other means to compete with another person, with another group of people hand in hand or head-to-head: they want those who can only stay in the farmland, want to stay in the farmland, have enough confidence to stay. They also have such abilities.
The participating teams are discussing strategies for growing lettuce in the container of the Duoduo Agricultural Research Science and Technology Competition.
Xu Dan graduated from Wageningen University, the world's most prestigious agricultural college, and experienced the planting wisdom of Dutch tomato growing enterprises. In 2018, he returned to China to found Beijing Polestar Agriculture, which practices the commercial operation of smart agriculture in a 30,000-square-meter plant factory. There are many things to fight against.
It is necessary to counter the attraction of the increasingly barren land. No one comes to recruit - most agricultural students are admitted to graduate school, and even if they work, they will not choose production enterprises. To recruit people, you have to teach these young people to produce in a completely unfamiliar environment, and deal with the big sisters and aunts who have dealt with the land since birth.
It also has to fight against the incomparably strong gravitational pull of the land. In the first year, the base recruited 100 villagers from nearby villages and taught them how to grow without soil and how to operate greenhouses. "They have curiosity in their eyes, but more of them are confused", and this drastic change in farming methods leaves them at a loss. After the first year, only 20 people remained at the base.
Xu Dan occasionally wondered, but still chose to take the next step. He saw the appearance of crossing the bridge, and in the Netherlands for 5 years, he saw that this country with a land area of only the size of Taiwan Province has the largest tomato export volume in the world. And he also spent five years to verify the rationality of the bridge - they grew twice the yield of tomatoes compared to conventional cultivation, and the localization rate of greenhouses increased from less than 5% five years ago to more than 85%.
"I firmly believe that smart agriculture is the future direction, and all the problems encountered so far are only temporary problems." At the time of his words, Xu Dan was on the high-speed train from Beijing to Anhui. Outside the car window, the North China Plain flashed and stretched endlessly, and the germinated wheat seedlings flickered, and he was shocked: "It's the spring ploughing season again." "In the neglected, dark, cold soil, the wheat will sprout, then pluck, tass, blossom, and churn the golden waves of wheat.