How can Internet Plus Agriculture take off with the wind?
Internet Plus Agriculture is at the forefront, bringing both opportunities and challenges. As the huge opportunity for development and industrial upgrading arrives, how Chinese agriculture can take off with the wind and be implemented on the ground requires more cold thinking and heated action from agricultural builders.
At present, the systemic efficiency of China's agricultural industry chain is low, the degree of agricultural modernization remains very low, and the industry chain faces “internal troubles and external threats.” Embracing the Internet has thus become a new way forward for agriculture's future. As the most traditional industry, agriculture has the greatest potential to be transformed by the Internet. In 2015, the Government Work Report of the State Council proposed the “Internet Plus” initiative for the first time. Internet technology began to be integrated with more industries, and Internet development entered the “industrial Internet” stage.
Deep integration of the industry chain
Exploring new agricultural models
“Internet Plus Agriculture” achieves leapfrog development of the agricultural industry. It is no longer simply the Internet connecting to agriculture, or agriculture merging with the Internet, to achieve disintermediation, improve efficiency and other old models, but rather it successfully brings the Internet and social capital into the track of driving agricultural development. On the one hand, “Internet Plus Agriculture” promotes specialized division of labor, raises the degree of organization, reduces transaction costs, optimizes resource allocation and improves labor productivity. On the other hand, “Internet Plus Agriculture,” through means such as facilitation, real-time operation, perception, IoT connectivity and intelligence, provides precise, dynamic and scientific all-round information services for farmland rights confirmation, agricultural technology extension, rural finance and rural management, and is becoming a new engine for the leapfrog development of modern agriculture.
⟦NL> The implementation of “Internet Plus Agriculture” first requires the construction and popularization of rural Internet infrastructure at the national level as basic support. On May 20, the General Office of the State Council issued the Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of High-Speed Broadband Networks and Promoting Network Speed Increases and Fee Reductions, explicitly proposing that this year 14,000 additional administrative villages will have broadband access, fiber-to-the-village construction will be implemented in 10,000 administrative villages, and more than 95% of administrative villages will have fixed or mobile broadband access; in the next two years, more than 80% of administrative villages will achieve fiber-to-the-village. It can thus be seen that the state attaches full importance to the construction of rural Internet facilities, crossing the initial threshold for the popularization of the combination of agriculture and the Internet.
In summary, around agricultural production, the entire agricultural industry chain system includes links such as agricultural input supply, agricultural finance, agricultural production and the circulation, processing and consumption of agricultural products. Through combination with the Internet, breakthroughs have already been made in the circulation links of agricultural inputs and agricultural products.
On May 8, the State Council issued the “Eight National Measures on E-Commerce,” proposing to strengthen the integrated development of the Internet and agriculture and rural areas. The central finance will allocate 2 billion yuan in special funds for the construction of rural e-commerce infrastructure. The introduction of this policy will surely further promote the development of the e-commerce industry for agricultural inputs and agricultural products. In addition, the previously hot Internet finance sector has also welcomed the “1+1+X” industrial innovation development model, beginning to combine the advantages of the Internet and finance to serve a third party. Among this, the huge demographic dividend and blue ocean of capital in the “three rural” fields will also attract social capital to continuously flow into the field of agricultural finance.
The key to advancing the true integration of the Internet and agriculture should be to focus on the integration of the entire industry chain, not merely one link within it. Likewise, the e-commerce platform formed by the integration of Internet Plus Agriculture should not merely move agricultural products online for sale, but should consider the improvement and innovation of the agricultural industry chain.
Just as Lenovo's model of doing agriculture set out to build a new model of deep integration of the Internet and the agricultural industry. Lenovo's transformation of agriculture is all-round: it not only uses Internet technology to transform production links and raise production levels, but also uses Internet technology to control the entire production and operation process to ensure quality, while also using Internet technology to innovate product marketing, ultimately opening up every link of agriculture and forming a complete industry chain. For another example, Alibaba Group is also laying out an industry chain model of deep integration of the Internet and agriculture, planning to rely on its entire ecosystem for the development of rural e-commerce. Businesses such as Alipay, Yu'ebao, Zhaocaibao and Ant Micro-Loan are all already linked to rural areas, and in the future big data will be used to directly enter the rural financial market to meet farmers' funding needs.
“Internet Plus Agriculture” has created many novel combination models through exploration and practice. But whether it is the smart agriculture model with deep application of Internet technology, the e-commerce service model for agricultural inputs and agricultural products with comprehensive application of Internet marketing, or the industry chain model of deep integration of the Internet and agriculture, wave after wave of capital is raring to go. Is it blowing up a round of bubbles under the concept of “Agriculture Plus the Internet,” or, through profound transformation and deep integration, enabling the agricultural industry to embrace the huge development and industrial upgrading brought by the Internet tide? Time will give us the best answer.