How to slice up the ten-trillion-yuan Internet Plus agriculture market cake
From upstream agricultural inputs, to the intermediate production stage, and then to downstream supporting services such as storage, logistics and transport, the total wealth of China's agricultural market is believed to reach as much as ten trillion yuan. If the production and daily-life consumption activities of farmers and rural areas are included, the entire big “three rural” sector is breeding immeasurable business opportunities. How to seize the historic opportunity of “Internet Plus agriculture” was the topic discussed from their respective perspectives by Meng Zhaoli, chief economist of the Tencent Research Institute, Gao Haiyan, vice president of Yimutian Group, and Ren Mu, co-founder of Youth Caijun, at the 14th Internet Frontier Salon held on the evening of August 11.
Meng Zhaoli, chief economist of the Tencent Research Institute, said in a keynote speech titled “Internet Plus the Three Rural Issues: A Package Solution” that China faces the dual challenges of a severe agricultural production situation and relatively backward rural governance. Judging from experience at home and abroad, mobile internet is the most cost-effective investment capable of raising the level of coordinated social and economic development, and mobile internet can likewise become a lever to help solve the three rural issues in China.
Social platforms such as WeChat official accounts and mobile QQ can help public health departments quickly collect information, promptly understand the spread of pests and diseases, make timely deployments, achieve large-scale information notification, mobilize the broadest possible public strength, and safeguard food security. In the 2014 pest and disease control work, the agricultural technology station of Tanjiachang Township, Chenxi County, Huaihua, Hunan, used the WeChat platform to release pest and disease forecasts in a timely manner, enabling farmers to promptly grasp the occurrence and development of crop pests and diseases, apply pesticides in time, apply them correctly, and improve control effectiveness, winning deep praise from farmer friends.
Tencent OS combines connectivity, superior content services and the manufacturing capabilities of smart hardware manufacturers, and combines the wisdom of technology developers and agricultural producers, joining hands to “create infinite possibilities”; Tencent Cloud's data storage and computing functions can help store historical grain data and dynamically analyze crop growth conditions; WeChat can connect mobile phones with smart devices and agricultural machinery, and users can remotely control agricultural machinery through their phones to achieve smart production.
WeChat can also help farmers exchange and share planting experience, push industry production knowledge in a targeted way, and provide remote agricultural diagnostic services. The Lvyuan Vegetable Professional Cooperative in Suning County, Hebei Province, set up a WeChat group to promptly share relevant planting techniques and pest and disease prevention knowledge, cultivating more than 50 million high-quality vegetable seedlings each year and helping more than 5,000 farming households grow vegetables to increase income and become better off. Wang Zhihua, a farmer in Chongren County, sent a picture of rice pests and diseases in his own paddy field to Wang Liangshou, a plant protection expert in the county, via mobile WeChat. A few minutes later, Wang Zhihua received a diagnosis and scientific control recommendations.
WeChat will also become an entry point for rural medical care, realizing functions such as the popularization of medical knowledge, remote interactive diagnosis and treatment, and access to commonly used medicines. WeChat official accounts regularly push public medical information, such as the prevention and treatment of common infectious diseases, medical prenatal examination knowledge for pregnant women, and the identification of mental illness, to raise farmers' level of medical awareness and prevent common diseases; relying on the interactive service functions of WeChat official accounts, pictures and voice messages are transmitted to achieve remote diagnosis and treatment of common poultry diseases and prevent the occurrence of avian influenza, so farmers no longer need to make a special trip to find a veterinarian; each village's official account summarizes the village's medical information, such as which medicines are needed and how much is needed, and basic medicines and medical equipment are delivered through WeChat, making it convenient for local clinics to obtain essential medicines.
Gao Haiyan, vice president of Yimutian Group, said in a speech titled “Yimutian: Breakthrough at Points and Structural Transformation” that it will build a bridge of information, trust and credit between farmers and consumers, establish an information market, a trading market and a service market, realize an incentive mechanism and process reengineering, and gradually achieve consumption-driven production, origin traceability and informationized circulation. Unlike many e-commerce companies, Yimutian is an e-commerce platform with mud on its feet, and it also has a strong sense of mission: to increase farmers' income, reduce the burden on urban residents, and create a new agricultural civilization.
Ren Mu, co-founder of Youth Caijun, said in a speech titled “How Internet Plus Agriculture Solves the Last-Mile Problem” that Youth Caijun's business model was dug out and built based on a judgment of the pain points of the fresh food industry. The first is the problem of inventory loss. Inventory often brings high losses, and Youth Caijun's solution is for users to place orders online one day in advance, and then purchase, produce and process according to the users' menus. So Youth Caijun has no inventory, reducing inventory loss; the second is the last-mile delivery problem. Given the high cost of home delivery, Youth Caijun insisted at its founding on not doing home delivery at affordable prices for its dishes, but instead setting up self-pickup points in communities and at subway entrances, delivering goods to the place closest to customers, so that each user only needs to take them home along the way.