Modern agriculture actively pursues IT upgrades and precisely connects production with sales
As a hot field of "Internet Plus," modern agriculture has begun to actively pursue IT upgrades, innovate product circulation formats and precisely connect production with sales. Driven by policy, the integration of agricultural infrastructure and IT is expected to keep accelerating, and many internet companies regard rural e-commerce as a "blue ocean." In the future, agriculture and the internet will undergo deep integration in the fields of smart agriculture and agricultural product e-commerce
Modern agriculture is one of the 11 key fields defined in the Guiding Opinions on the "Internet Plus" Action, and is also a hot field in which various types of capital are currently investing under "Internet Plus." Not long ago, the New Hope Group joined hands with the agricultural product B2B trading platform "Yimutian" to enter the agricultural product e-commerce market. Traditional leading agricultural input enterprises such as Dabeinong, Stanley and Kingenta are also accelerating their efforts to move into "Internet Plus agriculture." Experts believe that the deep integration of agriculture and the internet in the future will mainly have two growth points: first, smart agriculture in the production sector, and second, agricultural product e-commerce in the circulation sector.
Information technology in farming and animal husbandry
"Hello expert, brown markings have appeared on the leaves. Please help me see what disease the strawberry seedlings have?" Recently, at the "12316 video terminal" in Yema village, Pinghu city, Zhejiang province, farmer Yang Ying consulted cash crop expert Wu Ping about the disease through a video call. Through the remote video, Wu Ping preliminarily diagnosed strawberry anthracnose and issued a "prescription."
The "12316 remote agricultural technology video diagnosis system" is a public-benefit information project for farmers implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture. Since last year, the Ministry of Agriculture has built a batch of village-level information service stations in 10 pilot provinces, promoting the connection of agricultural public-benefit services and e-commerce resources to village-level stations. Up to now, 3,700 villages across the country have set up Yining information cooperatives.
Transforming agriculture through internet technology and raising the level of intelligence in each link helps achieve "a measurable environment, controllable production and traceable quality." Xu Shiwei, director of the Information Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said that taking animal husbandry as an example, relying on the "internet" and the agricultural Internet of Things can enable automatic feed feeding systems to optimize and regulate the feeding time and feeding amount for livestock and poultry based on information such as their growth cycle and feeding conditions.
Driven by policy, the integration of agricultural infrastructure and IT is expected to accelerate. According to relevant plans, agricultural departments will develop and promote intelligent water-saving irrigation systems and continuously improve the IT level of farmland water conservancy. They will build a batch of facility-based livestock, poultry and aquaculture farms integrating intelligent perception, intelligent transmission and intelligent control, improve the intelligence and automation level of livestock, poultry and aquaculture, and promote increased production and efficiency in livestock, poultry and aquaculture. They will accelerate the integration of agricultural machinery and agricultural equipment with information technology and develop intelligent operation machinery and equipment.
E-commerce revolutionises product circulation
In the traditional agricultural marketing model, fresh agricultural products must go through multiple links from the field to citizens' dining tables, and when information is not smooth, the phenomenon of "expensive to buy and hard to sell" is unavoidable. The internet can effectively reduce circulation costs and precisely connect production with sales, not only spawning many fresh food e-commerce businesses in cities, but also bringing changes in circulation methods to the vast rural areas.
"The average annual income per greenhouse is 8,500 yuan, with total income reaching 68,000 yuan." Su Xinchao, head of the Sunshun Vegetable Cooperative in Tangshan city, Hebei province, looked excitedly at the last cart of cauliflower being hauled away by a buyer. This year, through agricultural data provided by the agricultural product trading information platform Yimutian, the cooperative tried growing organic cauliflower in 8 cold greenhouses, and unexpectedly the selling price reached as high as 4.4 yuan per kilogram.
At present, the rural e-commerce ecosystem has been activated, and many internet companies regard rural e-commerce as a "blue ocean." Alibaba and JD.com have respectively implemented the "thousand counties, ten thousand villages" and "channel sinking" strategies. From small and refined at the beginning to large and comprehensive today, almost all fresh food categories are now involved. Efforts to carry out fine-variety planting in various places are still continuing. In some areas where the overall level of IT is not developed, such as Longnan in Gansu and Tongren in Guizhou, agricultural product e-commerce has risen abruptly, converting a good ecological environment into economic value through e-commerce.
At present, the online trading volume of agricultural products is growing rapidly, and a batch of "Taobao counties" and "Taobao villages" has emerged across the country. The 2014-2015 China Agricultural Product E-commerce Development Report shows that there are about 4,000 agriculture-related trading e-commerce businesses in China. Along with the development of agricultural product e-commerce, agricultural internet finance platforms have also appeared one after another, and the business of financial platforms such as Ant Financial, JD Finance and Xiwang Finance, as well as vertical financial platforms such as Yinongdai and LiduoDuo, has begun to extend into rural areas.
The internet narrows the urban-rural gap
According to the Ministry of Agriculture's relevant plan for national agricultural IT development, the overall level of agricultural and rural IT is expected to rise from 20% in 2011 to 35% in 2015, meaning that this year the transition of agricultural and rural IT from the initial stage to the rapid advancement stage will be basically completed. This year, the Ministry of Commerce is advancing the development of county-level rural e-commerce in more than 2,000 counties nationwide, and is expected to build one county-level e-commerce service center and some village-level e-commerce service points in each county.
The development of modern agriculture relies increasingly on IT, but compared with other industries, China's agricultural IT still has problems such as a relatively weak foundation and insufficient overall coordination. Last year, the operating revenue of agricultural product e-commerce reached more than 100 billion yuan, accounting for about 3% of total agricultural product sales, but more than 7 percentage points lower than the share of online retail sales of consumer goods.
"Data shows that among 4,000 agriculture-related trading e-commerce businesses, only 1% can be profitable, 7% have huge losses, 88% have slight losses, and 4% break even." Gao Haiyan, dean of the Yimutian Research Institute, believes that the current unprofitability of agricultural product e-commerce is only a phenomenon, not a problem, and is the primary stage of e-commerce development. "Because e-commerce is redistributing the resources and market system of the agricultural product industry, different e-commerce businesses have different profit cycles, and in the future B2B platforms are expected to dominate agricultural product e-commerce," Gao Haiyan said.
⟦NL> In the view of Li Daoliang, a professor at the College of Information and Electrical Engineering of China Agricultural University, one of the core values of the internet for agriculture is to continuously transform agricultural production at the source through customer data and market analysis. Therefore, while formulating rural e-commerce plans, relevant departments also need to use the "Internet Plus" concept to simultaneously implement changes including agricultural production, supervision and marketing methods.
"Focusing on agricultural products and agricultural means of production, we should organise new agricultural business entities to connect with e-commerce platforms, not only selling the village's high-quality agricultural products but also enabling farmers to buy high-quality and low-priced means of production." Zhang Hecheng, director of the Market Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, said that through bringing information into villages and households, the country's administrative villages will ultimately be connected into one large network, forming agricultural big data, improving the government's decision-making capacity and level, and precisely pushing information to farming households.