Ten Thousand Mu of Wheat Harvested and Stored in One Day: Big Data Gives the Farm a Big Hand
The ten thousand mu of wheat at Deqiang Farm in Lingcheng District, Dezhou City, Shandong Province, was all harvested and safely stored in just one day. Regarding this massive wheat harvest “battle”, farm general manager Feng Shuqiang remarked with emotion: “It was big data that gave me a big hand!”
At Deqiang Farm, the application of the Internet of Things and big data makes it resemble a factory even more. The farm has the only officially operating field agriculture Internet of Things in the province, with 6 major systems: an information center, pump station monitoring, center-pivot irrigation machine monitoring, a weather station, video security monitoring and soil moisture monitoring. Together they form a modern farm macro-system integrating the “five networks” of water, power, roads, forest and information. The information center, as the central control platform, is directly “linked” to the Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences and conducts real-time monitoring and control of the other 5 major systems, providing important data for the scientific management of crops. The farm records a whole series of operations using the Internet of Things and, through self-developed software, carries out big data analysis to calculate the optimal allocation of manpower and materials for operations such as plowing and harvesting, thereby reducing cost inputs and maximizing benefits.
⟦NL> “As early as many days ago, we began monitoring the wheat and soil moisture. Today, the wheat moisture content dropped below 14%, reaching the optimal harvest standard, so it can go directly into storage.” Feng Shuqiang said, “Moreover, based on the wheat harvest data collected last year, we optimized the allocation of the farm's field roads, harvest routes, materials-to-people ratio and more.” Under this optimized design, the number of grain transport vehicles used across the whole farm decreased from 214 last year to 180 this year, the number of fuel trucks decreased by 2 compared with last year, and the number of service personnel for quality inspection, weighing, warehousing, guidance and other tasks also decreased by 18% compared with last year.
As for how to position fuel trucks and maintenance personnel so that fuel supply and repairs can be in place in the shortest time, and how to coordinate quality inspection and weighing so that wheat can be stored as quickly as possible, big data gave the most precise answers. Although the manpower and materials invested were reduced, operational efficiency was greatly improved. Last year, the harvest of ten thousand mu of wheat took two and a half days; this year it took only one day, and the total cost of the wheat harvest was reduced by more than 20% compared with last year.