The Internet Plus Agriculture Wave Is Here: Manage Your Farm with a Smartphone
The Internet Plus Agriculture Wave Is Here
A series of events shows that the Internet Plus agriculture wave is rushing toward us, and more agricultural innovation opportunities are emerging.
On May 8, the State Council issued the “Eight National E-commerce Measures,” proposing to strengthen the integrated development of the Internet with agriculture and rural areas. The central government will allocate 2 billion yuan in special funds for rural e-commerce infrastructure construction.
Subsequently, word came that the first draft of the Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Development of Rural E-commerce, involving more than twenty ministries and commissions including the Ministry of Commerce, had been completed, and the final document would be issued in the form of a State Council General Office document. This is the first document to comprehensively plan the development of rural e-commerce.
On May 20, the General Office of the State Council issued guiding opinions on accelerating high-speed broadband network construction and promoting network speed increases and fee reductions, explicitly proposing to add 14,000 administrative villages with broadband access this year, implement fiber-to-the-village construction in 10,000 administrative villages, and ensure that more than 95% of administrative villages have access to fixed or mobile broadband; in the next two years, more than 80% of administrative villages will achieve fiber-to-the-village.
Since the beginning of this year, the concept of Internet Plus agriculture has not only been reflected at the policy level; market giants are also carrying out a series of arrangements.
On May 18, Yimutian, the largest domestic agricultural product information trading platform, announced a strategic cooperation agreement with the listed company New Hope Liuhe. The two parties will work together to build a new collaborative model of an “Internet Plus industrial chain,” giving wings of Internet Plus to the procurement, production and sales links of traditional food production enterprises.
Previously, Alibaba and JD.com both announced the full-speed launch of rural e-commerce strategies. Alibaba launched the Rural Taobao Thousand Counties and Ten Thousand Villages Plan. In the next 3 to 5 years, it will invest 10 billion yuan to establish 1,000 county-level e-commerce service centers and 100,000 village-level service stations nationwide, covering one-third of the country's counties and one-sixth of rural areas. JD.com also launched the recruitment of “rural agents” and the rollout of “JD Help Service Stores,” exploring a two-way circulation model for the rural market.
“‘Internet Plus’ has created a mass-participation ‘crowdfunding’ model, with far-reaching influence on our country's agricultural modernization.” said Wang Wensheng, researcher and doctoral supervisor at the Agricultural Information Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. “Internet Plus” promotes specialized division of labor, improves the degree of organization, reduces transaction costs, optimizes resource allocation, and raises labor productivity. On the other hand, through means such as facilitation, real-time capability, perception, IoT connectivity, and intelligence, “Internet Plus” provides precise, dynamic and scientific all-around information services for rural land confirmation, agricultural technology extension, rural finance, and rural management, and is becoming a new engine for the leapfrog development of modern agriculture.
He believes that “Internet Plus agriculture” is a revolutionary industrial model innovation and will surely open a great transformation unseen in a thousand years for our country's smallholder economy.
E-commerce remains the hottest area of Internet Plus agriculture
Liu Shunde, director of the Fugou County Leek Research Institute, has sold vegetable seeds for more than 20 years and has never been as busy as this year. During the Spring Festival, he tried something trendy and distributed “seed red envelopes” via WeChat. A total of 5,000 packets of seeds of 6 new varieties were given to vegetable growers across the country through the WeChat public platform.
“These seed red envelopes were snatched up in just one day. The power of e-commerce is too strong!” Liu Shunde said. After the activity, his new varieties became widely known, and vegetable growers ordering online came in an endless stream.
Although May 24 was a Sunday, Liu Shunde could not take a rest and was still replying to various messages on his phone and computer. He said that this year, sales through WeChat, QQ and micro-stores accounted for more than 1/3, and the sales scope expanded from only surrounding counties and cities in the past to all parts of the country. “E-commerce sales are more precise and more efficient. Now that the Internet is widespread, as long as you have good products, you do not worry about selling them. I am confident that I can build Fugou leek seeds into the number one brand in the country.”
E-commerce is still the hottest entrepreneurial direction in the current Internet Plus agriculture field.
“More than 750 people signed up within 20 days. It's very hot.” On the morning of May 23, Mengzhou held the second Rural Taobao partner recruitment examination. Rural Taobao is about providing farmers with agricultural goods, agricultural materials and tools, and daily necessities, while also acting as an agent for online sales of agricultural products. Rural Taobao partners enjoy computers, televisions and other online trading necessities provided by Alibaba, as well as related technical support, business training, operational support, and logistics training.
Yang Liqin, manager of the Henan business division of Alibaba Group's “Rural Taobao,” said that Rural Taobao supports rural youth in starting businesses online, allowing farmers both to shop online and to “pan for gold” online. Mengzhou is the first rural Taobao demonstration county held by Alibaba Group in Henan, and it will be rolled out across the province in the future.
Sun Lijun, senior director of Alibaba's Rural Taobao business division, said that as more and more villagers return home to start businesses, an ecosystem surrounding Rural Taobao will gradually emerge, providing more entrepreneurial and employment opportunities, thereby allowing more young people to return and take root in rural areas and alleviating rural livelihood issues such as left-behind children and empty-nest elderly. He believes this is a benefit that the Internet age brings to rural areas.
Du Qianli, an Alibaba rural e-commerce lecturer and founder of the Xinxiang Shanzhiyun Local Specialty Store, is a practitioner of rural e-commerce. Last week he traveled far to Xinjiang to give a lecture on rural e-commerce. Du Qianli said that competition in rural e-commerce is becoming increasingly fierce and requires innovation and change. “Doing agricultural e-commerce requires Internet thinking, but even more it requires passion and persistence.” He said, “Are you truly willing to take root in rural life? Can you recognize your hometown's agricultural advantages? Can you withstand outside pressure? Only after thinking these three points through can you possibly make a name for yourself.”
Intelligence makes agriculture full of imagination
Internet Plus agriculture is not only an e-commerce model at the marketing level, but also includes a smart agriculture model in which Internet technology is deeply applied to agricultural production. Agricultural informatization, smart agriculture, and the agricultural Internet of Things are all manifestations of the Internet's application in agriculture.
In Luoyang, the Lohas Farm founded by Wu Di, a young man born in the 1980s, demonstrates the broad prospects of the Internet's application in agriculture. Not only are planting and management intelligent, but product sales also use Internet thinking. He can manage a 500-mu orchard with just one mobile phone.
Wu Di's Lohas Natural Garden Farm is located in the suburbs of Luoyang. Walking into the greenhouse, you will see all kinds of probes, cameras and instruments everywhere. He explained that the greenhouses are fully automated. The instruments in the nursery are used to detect air temperature and humidity, soil temperature and humidity, and carbon dioxide concentration, collecting data inside the greenhouse every 10 seconds and uploading it to the server for back-end data analysis.
Wu Di has software installed on his mobile phone and can receive information sent by the server at any time. When it is time to water, he moves his fingers, and the irrigation probe sprays out a fine curtain of water. Whatever happens on the farm, he can keep it all under control through his mobile phone.
Wu Di said this is agricultural Internet of Things technology, with a remote video monitoring system, remote intelligent water-saving irrigation control system, sprinkler and drip irrigation systems. In addition to using the Internet to manage the orchard, he also registered WeChat and Weibo accounts to attract customers through the Internet. Netizens contract orchards and vegetable plots on the farm and play a real-life version of the Happy Farm game, which can drive more than 6 million yuan in sales in a year.
In 2014, Wu Di's “Lohas Natural Garden Chain Farm” project won the national championship in the creativity group of the China Youth Agriculture-related Industry Entrepreneurship and Wealth Creation Competition. Wu Di said he has already brought a Luoyang apple production base and a kiwifruit base under his wing and operates them with the same model. More and more young friends around him are also starting businesses in this field. Wu Di hopes that in three years the chain farms can cover the whole province and drive 5,000 young people in the province to start businesses and find employment.
Henan, as a major agricultural province, has long used “Internet Plus” in the main grain wheat industry. Nearly 20 digital remote monitoring points for wheat seedling conditions have been set up in 9 cities of the province. This system also uses agricultural Internet of Things technology and can monitor local soil temperature and humidity, air temperature and humidity, total solar radiation and other data indicators to understand the environmental conditions of wheat growth. Through the monitoring room set up in Zhengzhou, researchers can monitor images and data in real time and then make diagnostic analyses.
Industry experts point out that from field to table, agriculture plus the Internet of Things is bringing huge entrepreneurial opportunities. There is room for Internet application innovation in links such as farmland, meteorology, water conservancy, facilities, pest and disease control, agricultural machinery and equipment, and agricultural product quality traceability.
Internet Plus agriculture must let farmers increase incomes and benefit
“Internet Plus agriculture” looks beautiful in every way, but there is an old saying: “Cherries are tasty, but the tree is hard to plant.”
To advance the integration of the Internet and agriculture, we should focus on the entire industrial chain, not just a single point.
For example, Lenovo's model of doing agriculture marks that Internet agriculture has entered a new level of deep industrial integration. Lenovo's transformation of agriculture is all-around: 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 industrial chain.
Likewise, agricultural product e-commerce formed by the integration of Internet Plus agriculture is not simply moving agricultural products online for sale; it should consider the improvement and innovation of the agricultural industrial chain.
The once hotly discussed “JD sends seeds to the countryside” activity involved JD.com providing high-quality seeds for agricultural products, farmers cultivating and planting them in rural areas, and sales through the JD platform after harvest. JD.com has now also begun to enter the agricultural materials market. If this industrial chain layout can take shape, it will bring transformation to agricultural production: farmers will only be responsible for production, and other links will be handed to the platform.
Alibaba Group is also laying out an industrial chain model of deep integration between the Internet and agriculture. It plans to rely on its entire ecosystem to develop rural e-commerce. Businesses such as Alipay, Yu'ebao, Zhaocaibao and Ant Micro Loan are all already linked to rural areas. In the future, it will use big data to directly enter the rural financial market and meet farmers' funding needs.
Of course, as the main actors in this Internet Plus agriculture transformation, whether farmers can accept the baptism of the Internet and become true “new farmers” is the key to deep integration between the Internet and agriculture. As early as February this year, the Ali Research Institute officially released the Report on China's New Farmers (2014). The report proposed that the formation of the new farmer group is an inevitable product of the Internet empowering “agriculture, rural areas and farmers.”
With the spread of the Internet in rural areas and the promotion of Internet technology applications in agriculture, future farmers will all be “new farmers.” “Internet Plus agriculture” must first aim to raise the incomes of these farmer brothers and sisters and let farmers increase incomes and benefit, rather than going to the countryside under various banners to grab land and money. Only “Internet Plus agriculture” innovations that truly help farmers increase incomes can win farmers' heartfelt recognition and can possibly gain an even broader market.