How Agricultural Informatization Brings Together the Forces of Agricultural Development

Agricultural informatization is a huge platform capable of providing new momentum for development. On this new platform, everything from IoT-enabled production and e-commerce to rural tourism and leisure, and rural medical insurance consumption, will undergo unimaginable changes.

How agricultural informatization can be widely applied and developed in the agricultural sector depends crucially on innovative thinking and innovative practice. Agricultural enterprises, farmers' professional organizations, agricultural entrepreneurs and others, as practitioners of the application and promotion of agricultural information, stand at the forefront of the greatest demand for and the greatest spirit of innovation.

The Ministry of Commerce recently issued the "Internet Plus Circulation" Action Plan, requiring that within the next year or two, 200 comprehensive demonstration counties for e-commerce entering rural areas be cultivated, in order to solve the "last kilometer" and "last 100 meters" problems of e-commerce entering villages; the Ministry of Agriculture announced at the national conference on advancing the pilot program of bringing information into villages and households held a few days ago that it will strive to extend the pilot program of bringing information into villages and households to all counties and administrative villages nationwide by 2020; the All China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives also stated that it will make work in rural e-commerce and other aspects of agricultural informatization a priority, striving for greater breakthroughs.

At the same time, China Telecom, Alibaba, JD.com, Nongxintong and many other e-commerce and related enterprises are stepping up their efforts to enter villages, broadening their channels for entering villages, and deeply cultivating the agricultural "blue ocean," striving to seize the initiative in the field of agricultural information.

From central agricultural departments to e-commerce enterprises, everyone is enthusiastically treating agricultural informatization as a field to cultivate and sow, which shows both that the importance of agricultural informatization to national progress and to the development of "agriculture, rural areas and farmers" is being widely recognized, and that the rural information market is still a fertile land urgently in need of development, deep exploration and innovative growth.

The importance of agricultural informatization is self-evident. From the vegetables, eggs and milk we eat and drink every day to the question of whether existing arable land can support our ever-growing needs, all are related to how fast agricultural informatization advances. Especially as a field that needs deep cultivation, agricultural informatization is a huge platform capable of providing new momentum for development. On this new platform, everything from IoT-enabled production and e-commerce to rural daily consumption, rural tourism and leisure, and rural medical insurance consumption, will undergo unimaginable changes.

However, this huge market began in its early days with the provision of market information on agricultural products such as potatoes and garlic. At that time, some sales brokers walking the rural fields negotiated with out-of-town buyers through computer networks, forming the earliest map of the rural e-commerce market. With the rapid advancement and spread of the internet, some agricultural enterprises applied IoT technology to agricultural production, from real-time monitoring of greenhouse crops to standardized management of water and fertilizer in open fields, and the IoT sketched out a brand-new face of modern agriculture; while more e-commerce companies racing to the countryside, and the desire for and embrace of the agricultural "blue ocean" by countless agricultural internet influencers, made the use and promotion of information blossom everywhere in the traditional agricultural sector.

The application of agricultural information is advancing and developing rapidly amid the mass entrepreneurship atmosphere of a stampede of ten thousand horses, while the encouragement and support of central policies, and the helping hands from central agricultural departments to local governments, have added tremendous momentum to the popularization and deepening of agricultural informatization. In recent years, from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Commerce to the Ministry of Land and Resources, the Ministry of Water Resources and the All China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives, departments have started from their own lines of work and made various arrangements for agricultural informatization through planning and design, project advancement and other means. The "Internet Plus Circulation" Action Plan and the "pilot program of bringing information into villages and households" emerged against this background.

It can be imagined that with policy encouragement and the support of government departments, both the speed and quality of agricultural informatization will improve markedly. However, as a new thing, how agricultural informatization can be widely applied and developed in the agricultural sector depends crucially on innovative thinking and innovative practice, and agricultural enterprises, farmers' professional organizations, agricultural entrepreneurs and others, as practitioners of the application and promotion of agricultural information, stand at the forefront of the greatest demand for and the greatest spirit of innovation. This requires government departments, in encouraging and supporting the application, promotion and deepening development of agricultural information, to both guide according to circumstances and act in line with the trend, improving the pertinence and effectiveness of various policies and measures, so that the encouragement and guidance of government departments and the innovative breakthroughs of the market become one, and the "placer gold" scattered across various departments forms an "alloy" as much as possible, rather than falling into the strange cycle of "nine dragons managing the water" for a long time as some past projects did. On this point, Vice Minister of Agriculture Chen Xiaohua put it well: "In advancing agricultural e-commerce, we must have an open and inclusive mindset; as long as it benefits farmers, we welcome and support it."