Agriculture's Embrace of Internet Plus Still Needs Deeper Involvement

One of the focuses of recent industry attention is the various story versions of “Internet Plus agriculture.” Agriculture and agricultural products, which look very rustic and backward, are rapidly embracing the most fashionable and hottest internet, giving people unlimited room for imagination.

For example, the difficult problem of unsalable agricultural products seems to have found a solution. Some time ago, news reports revealed that “nectarines in Zhouzhi, Shaanxi were unsalable, and fruit growers dumped the peaches into the river channel,” which attracted a great deal of attention. As a result, the emerging agricultural e-commerce platform “Yimutian” stepped forward, sent multiple teams to major peach-producing counties, launched emergency assistance operations, and helped farmers connect with sales channels in various places.

Driven by real demand and national policy, agricultural e-commerce is now ushering in unprecedented development opportunities. At present, in every link of the agricultural industry chain from production and processing to sales, whether in agricultural products, agricultural materials e-commerce, rural internet finance, or the field of agricultural informatization, the figure of “Internet Plus” can be seen. Before this, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun had made a special trip to recommend “Yimutian” to Liu Yonghao of New Hope, and e-commerce giants JD.com, Taobao and others were even rubbing their hands and going to the countryside one after another, which shows how hot agricultural e-commerce is.

Today's rural areas, agriculture, and agricultural products indeed need “Internet Plus.”

So far, traditional agriculture has basically still depended on the weather for food. From planting and breeding to the production end, there is a lack of accurate market demand forecasting, which brings great risk, while “Internet Plus” can effectively serve the agricultural industry chain. Under the “Internet Plus” way of thinking, the solutions, methods, and tools provided make the connection between enterprises and consumers more precise, gradually realize order-based production, make information at both the production and sales ends more symmetrical, and dissolve the risk of product backlog.

Today's consumers are also full of expectations for “Internet Plus.”

For many years, consumers have been deeply worried about food safety and the safety of agricultural products, and there is even a consumption barrier of “not knowing whom to trust.” Now, by scanning a code, one can know when a box of milk was produced and from which pasture it came. If one wants to know more, the code can also show the batch of feed used, quality inspection information, processing procedures, and so on. It is even possible to connect in real time through a mobile phone to a camera at the other end and see the “live broadcast” of the pasture, factory, and cows at that very moment. This right to know and transparency brought by the application of new technology are more reassuring than simply demanding that business owners speak of conscience, morality, and law-abiding behavior.

It can be said with certainty that there is still huge space for agricultural products to go online in the future. According to the latest data on the website of the Ministry of Agriculture, although China's agricultural product e-commerce has developed rapidly in recent years and the scale of online transactions has doubled, preliminary estimates show that although last year's national online transaction volume of agricultural products exceeded 100 billion yuan, it still accounted for only 3% of agricultural product sales.

Of course, “Internet Plus” in agriculture still has many practical difficulties that need to be solved.

Including the various emerging agricultural product e-commerce platforms today, in fact, they mainly still play the role of a sales bridge. They still have no way to carry out the necessary involvement, standardization, and supervision of the upstream, resulting in agricultural products purchased by e-commerce being uneven in quality, with an excessively high loss rate, and even some fresh agricultural products having pesticide residues exceeding the standard. This is a major problem existing in current e-commerce operations. A purely asset-light model cannot fundamentally solve the problem.

In addition, in today's upstream links such as agricultural product planting and breeding, practitioners are generally aging and not of high quality, and they are far from being able to use new technological means such as the internet with ease. If “Internet Plus” means are used to transform every link of the entire agricultural product value chain, from soil monitoring, production and processing to logistics and warehousing, all require huge capital investment. Individual farmers cannot bear such a heavy burden, and can only hope that certain centralized and large-scale leading agricultural enterprises will lead the completion of this transformation.