How can the internet raise the level of high-efficiency eco-agriculture?
The four characteristics of high-efficiency eco-agriculture are the “four mores,” namely greater economic benefit, less resource consumption, lower environmental pollution, and more employment of labor. It is both a fundamental transformation of the extensive growth mode of conventional agriculture, which is characterized by “high material consumption, high energy consumption, high pollution, poor coordination, difficult recycling, and low efficiency,” and a convergence of ordinary eco-agriculture and benefit-oriented agriculture in the direction of agricultural modernization. The marriage of the internet and high-efficiency eco-agriculture helps both to solve the problems faced on the production side and to resolve the contradictions encountered on the sales side.
Use the internet to raise the level of refinement in high-efficiency eco-agricultural production. Adopt agricultural IoT suited to local conditions to raise the level of refinement in high-efficiency eco-agriculture. For example, according to the characteristics of the planting industry, explore an integrated sky-and-ground agricultural IoT monitoring and control system, and build a three-dimensional precision operation model from multiple angles such as intelligent water-saving irrigation, soil testing and formula fertilization, and machine-positioning cultivation. Use modern agricultural IoT technology to achieve remote control, effective management, and timely monitoring of the agricultural production process, break away from the extensive traditional production model and move toward intensification, precision, intelligence, and dataization, and thereby give high-efficiency eco-agriculture an industrial attribute similar to that of manufacturing.
Use the internet to optimize networked services for high-efficiency eco-agricultural production. For ordinary practitioners of high-efficiency eco-agriculture, further improve agriculture-related information service platforms and service functions, and provide farmers with production and daily-life information services such as policy, market, science and technology, and insurance through the mobile internet. For high-efficiency eco-agriculture enterprises, explore models of strong-strong alliances between internet enterprises and agricultural operating entities, comprehensively use technologies such as big data and cloud computing, and establish an agricultural information monitoring system to provide services for disaster warning, cultivated land quality monitoring, prevention and control of major animal and plant diseases, market fluctuation forecasting, and scientific business decision-making.
Use the internet to expand the sales radius of agricultural products from high-efficiency eco-agriculture. At present, China's stage of imitative, wave-like consumption has basically ended, and personalized, diverse consumption has become mainstream. Agricultural operating entities must adapt to the consumption characteristics of the new economic normal and explore ways to improve their adaptability to personalized and diverse consumption of agricultural products. However, because personalized and diverse consumption of agricultural products has “niche” characteristics, traditional marketing methods are affected by geographical radius and cannot absorb the huge output of such agricultural products. The e-commerce platforms provided by “internet plus” have flattened the sales channels for agricultural products and expanded the sales radius from the region to the whole country, and even the whole world. By advancing the marriage of e-commerce and high-efficiency eco-agriculture, support new agricultural operating entities and agricultural product wholesale markets in connecting with e-commerce platforms, expand the sales radius of agricultural products, actively develop a production-determined-by-sales model, develop personalized customized services for agricultural products, and realize the transformation of high-efficiency eco-agriculture from production orientation to consumption orientation.
Use the internet to purify the agricultural product sales market of high-efficiency eco-agriculture. One reason the high-quality agricultural products produced by high-efficiency eco-agriculture face sales difficulties on the market is the “bad money drives out good money” effect caused by information asymmetry. Some agricultural products that pass off inferior goods as superior put on the pretty outer clothing of “organic” and “green” and occupy the market at extremely low cost. The use of the internet in the agricultural product sales process can customize “identity cards” and “resumes” for agricultural products, and eliminate information asymmetry in the agricultural product market through a food safety traceability system built along the supply chain, thereby realizing traceability of the whole process “from farm to table” and safeguarding “security on the tip of the tongue.” For production and operating entities developing high-efficiency eco-agriculture, support their promotion and application of information technologies such as the mobile internet, IoT, QR codes, and radio frequency identification in all links of production, processing, circulation, and sales, strengthen the connection of upstream and downstream traceability systems and the sharing of information, continuously expand the coverage of the traceability system, and advance the construction of an agricultural product quality and safety system.
(Author's affiliation: Institute of Economics, Party School of the Jiangxi Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China)