China's BeiDou satellites help precise fertilizer distribution

China's BeiDou navigation system is helping farmers apply fertilizers and pesticides more precisely, according to a report by Science and Technology Daily.

An intelligent fertilizer-pesticide distributor, assisted by the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System and big data technology, has been working in the wheat field in Hancun village in Jiangdu county, east China's Jiangsu Province.

Through the remote network technology service platform, the machinery can provide high precision fertilizer distribution. When the movement of the machinery deviates from the target path, the system can correct the deviation in real-time, according to Zhang Ruihong, a mechanical engineering professor with Yangzhou University and head of a team which developed the distributor.

Han Baolong, a farmer in the village, was quoted as saying that the automatic distributor helped him a lot because the novel coronavirus outbreak since January had caused a severe lack of workers who traditionally applied fertilizers and pesticides manually.