Crabs Raised in a Happy Pond: Exploring the Yixing Gaocheng IoT Aquaculture Base

   Gaocheng Town in Yixing City, Jiangsu Province, is close to the lake and has long been famous for farming Chinese mitten crabs, with aquaculture waters covering more than 50,000 mu. However, as the scale of farming continued to expand, crab farmers generally reported that a shortage of manpower was affecting the survival rate of crab seedlings and the quality of crab farming. Just as the crab farmers were worrying, in March 2011, the province's first IoT aquaculture base, jointly built by Wuxi Mobile, the China Mobile IoT Research Institute, the Yixing Agriculture and Forestry Bureau, and China Agricultural University, quietly settled in Pengyao Ecological Park in Gaocheng Town, using advanced IoT technology, network monitoring, and sensing equipment to help crab farmers "farm crabs intelligently." Half a year has passed, and it is once again the season of autumn with fat crabs. Master Huang, who uses "intelligent crab farming," could not hide his joy. He said: "This year the survival rate of crab seedlings increased by 15%, the crabs are bigger, the yield per mu is higher, and the market price has also risen another notch. I reckon my several dozen mu of crab ponds can earn me tens of thousands of yuan more than in previous years!"

    Master Huang is not the only one benefiting. Every crab farmer here gives a thumbs-up. What exactly is "intelligent crab farming"? Amid everyone's praise, our reporter walked into the Yixing IoT aquaculture base.

    A real-life "Happy Pond"

    It is often said that farmers "face the yellow earth with their backs to the sky, one body's strength and a hundred jin of sweat," but nowadays the crab farmers of Gaocheng Town sit in front of a computer, click a mouse, tap a keyboard, and can manage dozens of mu of aquaculture ponds without leaving home. Isn't this a real-life version of the once-popular online game "Happy Farm"? Wuxi Mobile uses a large number of sensor nodes to form a network monitoring system, helping crab farmers promptly discover problems during farming, accurately locate them, and adopt remote intelligent control measures to solve them. As of October this year, more than 1,000 water quality parameter collection devices have been installed, more than 100 data collection industry application cards have been deployed, covering 50,000 mu of river crab aquaculture waters, serving more than 1,000 aquaculture households, and monitoring 6 aquaculture points in real time through a remote video monitoring center.

    Remote aeration: By logging into the "Aquaculture Monitoring and Management System" via the internet or a mobile phone terminal, crab farmers can learn the dissolved oxygen level, temperature, water quality, and other indicator parameters in the aquaculture pond anytime and anywhere. Take dissolved oxygen, for example: green represents normal dissolved oxygen, yellow represents low dissolved oxygen, and red represents a warning. Once a dissolved oxygen indicator warning is found in a certain area, simply clicking "turn on the aerator" enables remote control. Old Shi, 56 years old this year, is a veteran crab farmer with more than 10 years of aquaculture experience. He said with deep feeling: "In the past, when farming crabs, I did not dare leave the pond for even a step all year round, especially at night, for fear that sudden weather changes would cause oxygen deprivation in the pond and kill the fish and crabs. Staying up all night guarding the pond was routine. Now it's better. Even if I go out traveling, I feel completely at ease and can control the aerator with my mobile phone at any time."

    Intelligent feeding: Crab farmers send SMS commands to the central platform from their mobile phones to control the automatic feeder to feed the aquatic animals in the pond area according to preset intervals and feeding amounts. After the command is sent, crab farmers who are not on site can also monitor the water surface conditions of the pond area in real time through the network video monitoring system, avoiding losses caused by misoperation. Crab farmer Zhou Baoyin said: "In the past, feeding meant making two rounds every day, and it was really hard work. Even a family of four was not enough. With the automatic feeder, it is much more convenient. Just click the mouse on time and it's done. My several dozen mu of ponds are all finished in less than 10 minutes!"

    Early warning information: Management personnel at the monitoring center can also judge possible weather changes based on the historical data accumulated for the pond area, and send information such as weather warnings and aquatic product disease warnings to all crab farmers through the platform, reminding crab farmers to take corresponding preventive measures such as aeration, transplanting aquatic plants, and pond clearing and disinfection. Master Zhang is in his early twenties and this year is his first time farming crabs. He told the reporter: "I count as a beginner, so my experience is certainly not as good as those veteran crab farmers. This early warning information is really important to me. It is like being taught hand by hand what to do and when. Look, the crabs I raised are not inferior in size to theirs!"

    In the eyes of the crab farmers, the IoT has really helped a lot. Management is easier, and profits are higher. With such good fortune, who isn't secretly delighted?

    Let informatization benefit rural areas

    The work related to "agriculture, rural areas, and farmers" has always been the issue of greatest concern to national leaders and governments at all levels. The Party Central Committee and the State Council have for many consecutive years issued No. 1 documents focusing on the "three rural" project, clearly putting forward requirements such as "promoting rural informatization," "improving the comprehensive rural information service system," and "accelerating the advancement of building a new socialist countryside."