Two Farmers Embark on the Internet Plus Path

Old Yang runs a small vegetable shop in Xiangshan, Beijing - Linhe Vegetable Shop, and Xiao Ma is his regular customer. One day, after Xiao Ma finished choosing his goods, he did not take out his wallet, but instead used his phone to scan a QR code at Old Jia's checkout counter, entered the amount of 17 yuan, and left.

Soon, Old Yang's phone received a notification that 17 yuan had been added to his account. What supported them in completing the payment was an O2O WeChat membership card system called Linhe. With this system, Old Yang could issue a card to Xiao Ma, and Xiao Ma no longer needed to carry small change.

Old Feng is a strawberry grower with 4 greenhouses at home. In previous years, the practice was to sell strawberries to vendors, who would bring them into the community to sell.

One day in March 2015, Old Feng set aside a few small plots and launched a crowdfunding project to crowdfund people to claim the plots. After claiming, all the strawberries produced on that plot would belong entirely to the claimant.

Soon several people paid to claim plots. Over the next few days, Old Feng took photos of the daily growth of the strawberries on these small plots and sent them to their owners. After the strawberries ripened, Old Feng packed the picked strawberries and delivered them to their owners. This was only a small experiment, but the few people who joined the claiming were very satisfied with this method.

This gave Old Feng great confidence. Old Feng said, "If I keep doing this for a year, I will no longer need to deal with those vendors."

Old Feng also did his own accounting. His strawberries sold to vendors for 15 yuan per jin, and sold directly to consumers for 30 yuan per jin. If in the future all of them could be sold directly to consumers, his income could double, and his profit would increase even more.

The best O2O tools are the ones farmers can use

As far as major domestic O2O websites and apps are concerned, it is still quite difficult for ordinary farmers to complete a series of online operations themselves. Fortunately, some internet companies in China have already begun developing O2O tools suitable for farmers to use. Recently, the reporter contacted Ding Jingtao, the person in charge of Linhe Technology, which provides payment and customer management tools to vegetable-selling outlets, and Lian Jie, the person in charge of the crowdfunding tool "Dong Xiaomi," which provides services to strawberry grower Old Feng.

Ding Jingtao analyzed that in China, any great fully creative activity, without the participation of farmers, can only be partial and small in scope. In this great tide of Internet Plus, how to build an external environment more convenient for farmers to participate in is an important topic. Two aspects are crucial. One is the network hardware environment, which requires the government to invest resources to build. The other is internet tools that are convenient for farmers to use.

"The best O2O tools are the ones farmers can use," Ding Jingtao said. "Group buying, online orders, and online payments - these O2O scenarios are already very familiar to urban white-collar workers, but for farming households, these methods that have been proven real and effective are still unfamiliar. I think a very important reason for this is that the tools are too complicated. Farmers have two characteristics. One is that they like simple things. If something takes you a long time to explain clearly to them, they basically will not try it. The second is that they spend most of their time doing labor, so the time they can use to operate a computer or phone is very limited."

Ding Jingtao further explained: In other words, what farmers need are products they can understand at a glance and that work as soon as they try them. "The card-issuing system we developed for farmers has only two actions. One is scanning a QR code, and the second is entering the amount. Then card issuance is complete. Card-swiping consumption is likewise two actions: scan the code, enter the amount. So our training is completed in one minute."

The biggest problem Ding Jingtao and his team currently face is that the rural network environment is still not strong enough, and in many places mobile phone internet access is inconvenient. He hopes the government can invest more resources to support rural network construction.

Use Internet Plus to connect agricultural product consumers with farmers

"Farmers are the group that needs crowdfunding the most," said Lian Jie, founder of the crowdfunding tool "Dong Xiaomi." "For farmers, at least in the primary industry, they have put in the most labor but have not received the value they deserve. The main reason is that they do not have advanced tools to connect with users. Crowdfunding can not only raise money, but is also a powerful tool for promoting products, discovering users, and locking in users. At the same time, it can also achieve a direct connection between producers and consumers, using mechanisms to solve the problem of opaque production processes.

In Lian Jie's eyes, the product design of the crowdfunding tool is to let farmers create and publish a crowdfunding project with one click, and to let people who see the project and are interested in it contact the project initiator (the farming household) with one click. "At the same time as these two one-click actions are completed, we have already created a management environment for the farming household, making it convenient for a farmer like Old Feng to manage the people interested in his strawberries and complete functions such as payment, production process display, and shipping. It is equivalent to giving farmers a simple customer management system."

"Agriculture is characterized by different locations and relatively large cultural differences between producers and consumers, resulting in high communication costs between producers and consumers. Using the Internet Plus model can better connect consumers of agricultural products with farmers. On the one hand, it can help consumers enjoy better agricultural products; on the other hand, it can help farmers earn more money. For all parties participating in agricultural Internet Plus, this is not only something beneficial to society, but also contains huge market opportunities," Lian Jie said.