How New Farmers Use Technology to Build Wealth in New Agriculture and Win the Future

When ancient agriculture meets an era of technological transformation, what kind of synergy does it produce? At the recent "Postal Savings Bank Cup" China Youth Agriculture-Related Industry Entrepreneurship and Wealth Creation Competition held by the Communist Youth League Central Committee and other departments, young people from all over the country used their vibrant projects to give you the answer.

Technological innovation brings not only a change of tools and techniques, but also a brainstorming revolution. This national competition attracted more than 37,000 projects and over 40,000 young entrepreneurs to register and participate over the course of half a year. With their full passion, brand-new ideas and advanced technology, contemporary youth are returning to the land to cultivate their own dreams and future.

They share a common name: "new farmers."

Finding Space in Industry Problems

At the televised finals, a young "vegetable seller" became the focus. His talkativeness made even the host feel the pressure, but what was even more captivating was the project——pre-washed vegetables. The venture capital seats specially set up for the competition could not stay calm, competing to invest, with the highest willing to put in 100 million yuan.

If after work in the afternoon, you could conveniently pick up your pre-ordered vegetable set from the electronic self-service pickup cabinet in your workplace cafeteria on your way home, you would certainly be impressed. Moreover, these vegetables are already matched with side dishes and seasonings according to recipes, so you can simply stir-fry them when you get home and enjoy a hearty meal. Not only does it save you the multiple steps of buying, washing and cutting vegetables, it also saves you the trouble of dealing with kitchen waste. More importantly, the price is even cheaper than vegetables from the supermarket.

Without investing too much time and energy, you can have a hot, healthy dinner at home. This indeed precisely captures the needs of young office workers. The person who brought this project is named Li Huang. His entrepreneurial team started from the last mile that fresh food e-commerce finds most troublesome, innovating models and technology to find their own space for development.

At present, they already manage 233 workplace cafeterias, serving more than 1 million people. In the end, this project conquered the venture capitalists, judges and audience, winning the growth group championship without any suspense.

Song Junwen, also in fresh food e-commerce, is a post-80s college graduate village official. He initially opened a shop on Taobao to help farmers sell local agricultural products such as lychees and longans. The project he brought also starts from industry problems. The planting industry is greatly affected by market fluctuations. How can demand and supply be better matched? They thought of using the internet and e-commerce platforms to let the market subscribe and pre-purchase in advance, striving to achieve order-based agriculture that directly connects supply and demand.

Facing the same problem, post-85s Deng Wenyi thought of relying on technological innovation. This young man, known as the "bayberry boss," is dressed in a crisp suit with polished leather shoes, handsome and full of style, making it completely impossible to associate him with the industry he is in. After graduating from university, Deng Wenyi returned to his rural hometown to start a business, which his childhood friends found hard to understand. This choice stemmed from something that had always pained him: his hometown is rich in bayberries, but even with a bumper harvest, because they cannot be preserved, farmers can only painfully "sell them cheap," and some even rot on the trees.

Before even graduating, Deng Wenyi chose to "wrestle" with bayberries. Bringing fresh bayberries, he went to research institutes in Beijing, consulting food experts one by one about preservation methods for bayberries, and ultimately found a method to preserve bayberry juice with the experts' help. Bayberry juice that normally spoils after a few days can be preserved for at least a year using his method!

Demanding the Future from Technological Development

What does an aircraft have to do with agriculture? Most people might think of agricultural departments spraying pesticides, but with technological innovation, drone technology is constantly maturing and costs are getting lower and lower. Young entrepreneur Jia Mingyue from Jilin tells everyone that the time has come for drones to be widely used.

The small aircraft Jia Mingyue introduced to everyone can carry a payload of 20 kg and can fly at a height of 1—3 m above the ground at a speed of 4 m per second. The project is called "multi-rotor plant protection drone," which uses small drones to spray pesticides. He did the math: buying 1 set of drones, calculated at 400 mu of plant protection work per day, with each operation lasting 10—15 days, and at two plant protection operations per year, the annual income can reach 40,000—60,000 yuan, and the purchase cost can be recovered in the second year. His drone made its first flight in July this year and completed its mission excellently.

"Playing with technology" is the young people's specialty. As more and more young people come to the agricultural field to play with technology, agricultural production is becoming more and more "high-end."

For example, this project from Guizhou——the construction of a green tea aroma research institute. Tea aroma is invisible and colorless. How do you capture it? And also fix it in place to achieve large-scale cultivation? This young team found this aroma: chestnut aroma. Then, through the entire process of tea production, including tea tree variety breeding, tea tree cultivation and tea leaf picking, they identified the technical parameters conducive to the synthesis of tea aroma substances.

Technology often has the power to turn the rotten into something magical. At the finals, Liu Fengqiong poured "hemostatic microspheres" into a beaker filled with water, then gave her presentation. After 34 seconds, the liquid turned solid. This magic trick won rounds of applause from the venture capital seats and the judges' seats.