Internet Helps Traditional Agriculture Transform and Upgrade
Our newspaper (Reporter Wu Gang) The report published in this newspaper on March 31, "“Internet Plus Agriculture” Ignites a “Spark” in Chongqing," provoked a strong response among some agricultural business owners, agricultural product dealers, and experts and scholars studying the Internet economy. Many people believe that “Internet Plus” opens a window for the upgrading of traditional agriculture. By leveraging the Internet, traditional agriculture has found a path for transformation and upgrading, and media reports can effectively play a guiding role.
Over the past nearly 10 years, Liu Yao, head of Tongliang Kaisheng Agricultural Company, has successively transferred hundreds of mu of land in University Town and Tongliang to grow vegetables, always using the traditional “wholesale—retail” sales model. There were too many circulation links, and profits were not ideal. Last year, he began trying the Internet. Through e-commerce platforms, he delivered vegetables directly to consumers' doorsteps, increasing the profit margin.
After Liu Yao's story appeared in this newspaper and was published on the WeChat public platform, it was repeatedly forwarded by his friends in Moments, and it also brought him many new followers. When Liu Yao called this newspaper's reporter, he said that the report objectively analyzed the difficulties existing in agricultural product e-commerce, and that he had not previously conducted such research. Having gained new inspiration from the report, he planned to form a professional e-commerce team to expand online sales.
Yu Lixia, manager of the Operations Planning Department at Hongjiu Fruit, believes that the main difficulties in agricultural product e-commerce are, first, the relatively high cost of cold-chain logistics. SF Logistics' shipping fee for fruit is usually more than 20 yuan per kilogram; second, e-commerce platforms charge relatively high fees. For example, for “WeChat merchants” on WeChat, a transaction fee of six-thousandths is charged based on transaction volume. To reduce e-commerce platform fees, the best way is to dilute costs by expanding online sales. For this reason, Hongjiu established its own logistics fleet and planned to increase ground promotion efforts, setting up display and sales areas in major commercial districts to guide more consumers to go online by scanning QR codes.
Pu Yongjian, a professor at the School of Economics and Business Administration at Chongqing University, said that the value of the Internet to traditional agriculture lies in its ability to achieve supply and marketing connections across regions and even across national borders, thereby organizing production according to sales. This is equivalent to a reorganization of all elements of the industrial chain and fundamentally avoids overproduction, which no other technology can achieve. For the Internet to be deeply integrated into agriculture, the current urgent task is to establish a complete agricultural database. At present, our city does not lack databases, but the information is incomplete and has not truly and effectively played a role. The data on some agricultural websites has not been updated for a long time, so so-called big data analysis and application naturally cannot be discussed.