Agritech must be cost-effective to take root, precision farming expert says

Working with farmers in China’s agricultural heartlands has taught plant geneticist Yang Junfeng an indelible lesson –innovation will only take root if it is simple to use and makes economic sense. 

"If we want to promote high-tech farming on a large scale and really put it in the hands of farmers, then the cost effectiveness should be high and the cost must be controllable,” said Yang, a member of Hamato, one of four finalist teams in Pinduoduo’s Smart Agriculture Competition, an annual challenge to promote technology and innovation in agriculture.

China has made digitalization of the agricultural sector a priority, including it in a recent five-year plan on the digital economy. Smart agriculture, which refers to the usage of technologies like the Internet of Things, sensors and artificial intelligence in farming, can increase the quality and quantity of crops while optimizing the use of human labor. 

Teams taking part in the Pinduoduo agriculture competition must balance production yield, nutrition level and environmental sustainability when designing their protocols. This year, the finalists are tasked to cultivate cherry tomatoes at a smart greenhouse base in Yunnan. 

The tomatoes are grown in automated greenhouses that use sensors to monitor growing conditions and algorithms to analyze and recommend actions. Growers can adjust inputs of water and fertilizer with more precision to achieve greater yield. Most of the work is done remotely through cloud-based control systems, with support from a handful of on-site technicians. 

The competition, co-organized by China Agricultural University and Zhejiang University with technical guidance from the FAO and Wageningen University & Research, has provided Yang and his teammates a perfect testing ground for new growing techniques and algorithms for controlling greenhouse conditions. 

In one instance, Yang had to tweak the greenhouse system’s ventilation control function to be less sensitive to fluctuations in temperature after discovering the windows opened and shut as many as 400 times a day. For a working farm, that would be too energy-consuming and costly. 

According to Yang, Pinduoduo’s access to farmers can help provide a bridge between academia and commercial production, helping to modernize the sector. The company is the largest agriculture platform in China, connecting millions of farmers to its customer base of hundreds of millions of consumers. 

Last year, a team from the inaugural Smart Agriculture Competition commercialized its technology and is now working with farms in Dandong, one of China’s main strawberry-growing regions, to increase their production yields. 

The competition is also a great opportunity for cross-disciplinary cooperation to try out new ideas, such as developing better sensors and using them to collect better data, which would then be used to control the system with more precision, Yang said. 

“Through this competition I want more people to know that China’s agricultural research has made a lot of breakthroughs and accumulated a lot of experience,” Yang said. “We can apply them into actual production.”