More capital entering agriculture helps build agricultural brands
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E-commerce for agricultural products is considered a big cake with a potential market worth trillions, and it is one of the few virgin lands in China's e-commerce sector. This has also attracted large amounts of capital from IT, real estate and other fields to pour into agriculture. With large amounts of capital entering the agricultural sector, will agriculture's development model become more diverse?
Everyone now talks about doing agriculture with Internet thinking, but some experts at the meeting also said: agriculture must be done with agricultural thinking. Li Maochang, general manager of Xianxiang Agricultural Development (Beijing) Co., Ltd., believes that business thinking is about making money, using agricultural products merely as a carrier. But agricultural thinking is about first doing the work of agricultural production well, such as following natural laws, ensuring product safety, and scientific planting or breeding, and then making money is only natural.
“In European and American countries, industry and commercial services were also developed first, and then they came back to support agriculture. Our country's agriculture is no exception. This is a natural law. The core of supporting agriculture comes down to three things. First, funding: large amounts of idle social funds and industrial and commercial capital enter the agricultural industry. Since it is called an industry, industrial production methods are used to integrate agriculture and industrialize it, or semi-industrialize it. It is impossible to achieve fully industrialized production. In the United States, the farm model can basically achieve this, but in our country it still needs time. We have long been in the channel business, and will establish 1,000 Hemaoyoupin stores nationwide, targeting mid-to-high-end customer groups in medium-sized cities with high-quality agricultural products. We will integrate e-commerce and physical stores into one, creating a real O2O model.” introduced Jiang Yatong, chairman of Guangdong Hemaо (Group) Investment Co., Ltd.
■ Enterprise experience
Developing its own traceability system
●Wang Jun, business development director of Legend Holdings Joyvio Group
After investing in agriculture, the business underwent a round of restructuring and upgrading. A very important aspect was the upgrading of informatization. The first is full-process traceability: from the variety to the plot where it was planted, who planted it, what kind of fertilizer was used during the process, when it went on the market, and what characteristics the fruit has, all of this can be obtained through a QR code, and all users can share it through a mobile phone or computer terminal.
There is also high-definition camera monitoring across the entire park, transmitted through optical fiber and wireless. For example, what insects are on which trees and what biological control methods need to be adopted. In the park there are also weather stations and soil monitoring; for example, soil moisture and nutrients can be directly displayed on a large screen.
■ Hot topic Q&A
Doing agriculture is a dialogue between life and life
Q: What does more social capital participating in the agricultural market mean for the future development of agriculture?
Chen Jinfa, deputy director of the Quality Agricultural Products Development Service Center of the Ministry of Agriculture: For some non-agricultural enterprises to participate in agricultural development, this should be an issue of great concern to the whole society, and there are now many comments on this online. The fact that so many enterprises can enter the agricultural sector has far-reaching significance and value for leading the development of the agricultural industry to a new level, especially for brand building. This is because the concept of branding is stronger in the industrial sector than in the agricultural sector; moreover, in product quality monitoring, industry also does better than agriculture in full-process traceability and controllability.
Of course, building an agricultural product brand may differ from building an industrial product brand in one respect. Doing agriculture is a dialogue between life and life, because agricultural products are living things. Doing agriculture must combine money with emotion; it cannot be done with money alone, and it must be done with emotion. Because agricultural products involve the vast countryside and are also living things, they must be engaged with emotion. I hope that in the future enterprises involved in agricultural products can understand this aspect more, and perhaps they will be able to do better.