Fujian: Digital “new farm tools” cultivate “smart fields”

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The fifth Digital China Construction Summit held recently presented the digital development of modern agriculture in multiple dimensions: on unmanned farms in the black soil of Northeast China, farming and harvest prevention The key is completed; in the mountainous and hilly tea gardens in the south, the carbon balance account book is clear at a glance; in the factory laying hen house, can you identify dead chickens and low-yielding chickens at a glance?

In the digital age, traditional agriculture? Looking at the sky to eat? Facing the loess The stereotype of "turning one's back to the sky" has been broken. Intelligent equipment has become "new agricultural tools", data has become "new agricultural materials", and high-yield and high-yield "smart fields" have been cultivated.

The digital journey of a laying hen

For chicken farmers, the most time-consuming and frustrating thing is not feeding the ingredients or cleaning the chicken coop, but A dead chicken was found among the flock of chickens.

The laying hen farm of Fujian Guangyang Egg Industry Co., Ltd., located in Yuxi Town, Fuqing City, has 12 chicken houses, with a stock of 50,000 chickens in each building. Every day, the keeper of each chicken house spends most of the day inspecting the chicken house to find dead chickens. ?If not handled in time, diseases will easily occur, and egg blockage will occur, preventing eggs from entering the egg transport line smoothly. Farm director Li Guobin said that finding three or two dead chickens in a flock of 50,000 chickens is tantamount to finding a needle in a haystack, and it is a test for the breeders both physically and mentally.

The laying hen breeding robot Mujilang was launched last year, liberating the chicken farmers. ?Using artificial intelligence technology, ?Mujilang? can determine whether a laying hen is a dead chicken based on its morphological characteristics and provide an accurate location. The breeder only needs to follow the picture to eliminate it in time. ?Li Guobin said that the status of chicken heads and feet is an important basis for judging the status of laying hens. Generally speaking, the claws of dead chickens are mostly stiff. ?With the help of the ?Muji Lang??s insight, the detection rate of dead chickens can reach 99%. ?

Digital agriculture makes raising chickens more efficient with less effort.

As a leading company in the field of eggs and poultry, Guangyang Egg Industry has been involved in digital agriculture as early as 2012 and started to build an agricultural Internet of Things system. This system can monitor the environmental data of the chicken house in real time and find the "mother" for each egg through the traceability system. However, in the view of company chairman Yu Jie, this system is a bit "not useful" and does not help much in improving production efficiency.

?Digital agriculture is not just about laying out a bunch of sensors, but also about using massive amounts of data to serve production. ?In 2018, Guangyang Egg Industry was selected into the digital agriculture pilot project of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Yu Jie began to review and reflect on what digital agriculture should be like.

After several years of exploration, Guangyang Egg Industry has built a digital breeding system. Laying hen farming has thus achieved a high degree of digitization in the entire process: automatic collection of environmental data, automatic environmental control, automatic precision feeding, automatic manure cleaning, disease monitoring and early warning, automatic egg collection and packaging? It was launched in 2020 and put into use globally last year. The first commercial chicken-raising robot, Mujilang, is the latest achievement of its digital transformation.

Searching for dead chickens is just one of the many skills of "Mujilang". Yu Jie classified his "eighteen martial arts skills" into three categories: "Dai Wang Mountain Patrol", which conducts chicken house inspections regularly or according to instructions; "Dynamic Clearing", which promptly detects and locates dead chickens and low-yielding weak chickens; and "Decision-making" High-parameter technology automatically generates charts such as environmental clouds, abnormal behavior, and distribution of dead animals, providing scientific basis for improving breeding methods.

Mujilang did what the breeder wanted to do but couldn't. Take the investigation of low-yielding weak chickens as an example. In egg poultry breeding, egg production rate is the most important indicator. Low-yielding, weak chickens? They can only eat but cannot lay eggs?, and their input-output ratio is extremely low. However, it is almost impossible to accurately find out which chickens are low-yielding and weak chickens manually. ?Mujilang?can be accurately identified. Thanks to this, Guangyang Egg Industry can save 0.5 kilograms of feed per chicken per laying cycle. Currently, one kilogram of feed costs 3.5 yuan. Significant cost savings and efficiency gains.

Recently, "Mujilang" fed back to the background a chart of abnormal behavior of laying hens: chickens in a certain area frequently opened their mouths. ?Combined with environmental data, we found that the temperature in the area was uneven and the smell was strong, and we made timely improvements and optimizations to provide a comfortable growth environment for every chicken. ?Yu Jie said that this easily overlooked detail is actually the emotional expression of the laying hens.

Through technology iteration and deep learning, "Mujilang" will become smarter.

In Yu Jie's vision, in the future, "Mujilang" is expected to accurately judge the health status of laying hens in multiple dimensions through "seeing, hearing, asking and knowing", and can also provide a more accurate nutritional model for laying hens through big data analysis, and how much should be supplemented. Carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, and fibers no longer rely on experience, but are all spoken by data, thereby achieving the goals of precise feeding and food saving.

Digital solutions to industry pain points

Behind the digital journey of a laying hen is the digital transformation of Fujian agriculture.

?We promote the deep integration of digital technologies such as the agricultural Internet of Things, satellite remote sensing, 5G, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data with agricultural production and management. ? Chen Hong, Director of the Market and Information Technology Department of the Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, said that since 2017, Fujian has taken the lead in organizing and building modern agricultural smart parks nationwide, using digitalization to empower tea, edible fungi, fruits, vegetables, livestock and poultry and other Fujian’s advantages and characteristics. industry.

Data shows that Fujian has built 5 national-level digital agriculture demonstration bases, more than 60 provincial-level modern agricultural smart parks, and 700 agricultural Internet of Things application bases, with a total investment of 150 million yuan in financial funds, leveraging The social capital is more than 1 billion yuan, radiating and driving more than 1,000 new agricultural business entities of various types in the province.

Digital technology directly addresses the pain points of traditional agriculture and realizes the process reengineering of agricultural production and operation.

In the context of carbon peak and carbon neutrality, how can agriculture show its responsibility? Digitization makes agricultural carbon balance and expenditure clear. Fujian Bama Tea Co., Ltd. has introduced a meteorological observation system to record tea garden temperature, precipitation, radiation and other related meteorological data in real time.

? We used meteorological data, combined with field-measured leaf area index, vegetation aggregation index and other indicators, to derive tea tree carbon flux through ecological process models; we conducted laboratory physical and chemical analysis by sampling soil , to estimate soil organic carbon storage in tea gardens. Wang Miaomiao, a researcher at the Digital Agriculture Research Institute of the Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said that after figuring out the background of agricultural carbon sinks, it laid the foundation for future agricultural carbon sink transactions. ?

At the fifth digital summit held recently, Fujian Bama Tea Co., Ltd. displayed a tea garden "carbon ledger" through a visualization platform: a 400-acre tea mountain located in Xiping Town, Anxi County. Tea trees can achieve net carbon sequestration of 101.66 tons per year; in the soil layer of 0 to 20 cm, the carbon storage is approximately 1108.46 tons.

The tea processing process also contains emission reduction potential. In Anxi, an intelligent system that can simulate the craftsmanship of tea-making masters is about to be put into commercial use. ?We deeply integrate technologies such as the Internet of Things, intelligent control, digital twins, and artificial intelligence into oolong tea production processes such as sun-drying, cooling, shaking, finishing, rolling, wrapping, and drying. ?Li Zhipeng, a researcher at the Digital Research Institute of the Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said that in 2019, the institute teamed up with many tea-making masters in Anxi to form a collaborative innovation team to carry out joint research on key technologies for intelligent primary processing of Tieguanyin. ?This technology accurately collects Data such as the intensity, time, and frequency of manual tea making are recorded, and indicators such as tea water loss rate are also recorded, ultimately achieving the effect of machine simulation of manual labor, precise production, energy saving and emission reduction?

The African swine fever epidemic has had a huge impact on the pig breeding industry. Digital agriculture protects agricultural biosecurity. ?In the past, pig trays, weighing, etc. were all done manually, which virtually increased the risk of infection. ?The scientific and technological service team of Wu Feilong, a scientific staff member of the Institute of Agricultural Engineering Technology of the Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences, carried out a digital agriculture pilot at Fujian Xingyuan Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Technology Co., Ltd. to explore smart agriculture solutions for animal disease prevention and control.

?Staff can remotely control the smart hardware in the pig farm through mobile phone terminals to achieve smart pig trays, smart weighing, fat condition monitoring, smart feeding, and traceability management, thereby greatly reducing personnel intervention and effectively Reduces the risk of infection in pigs. ?Wu Feilong said that because production management is more scientific and refined, the delivery of antibiotics, additives and veterinary drugs can be effectively controlled, thus ensuring food safety and greatly reducing pig house management costs.

How to use digital agriculture better

With rising labor costs, favorable policies, technological progress, and user education carried out in recent years, digitalization has increasingly become a new direction for the transformation of agricultural modernization, and ushered in a new round of investment and entrepreneurship boom. However, from the perspective of industry players, the breadth and depth of digital agriculture development need to be expanded.

Li Zhipeng found in his research that many digital agriculture projects emphasize construction over operation. ?The display components of some projects are greater than the actual application effects. ?He said that many digital agriculture projects only achieve simple information transmission and display, fail to be deeply integrated with agricultural production and operations, and are difficult to solve practical problems in the agricultural production process.

In Li Zhipeng’s view, many agricultural information service companies have made great efforts to build platforms, but lack professional management and operation services, resulting in low utilization of digital agricultural systems and causing problems between some farmers and agricultural enterprises. ?Prejudice that information technology is useless.

Lin Qiong, an associate researcher at the Soil and Fertilizer Research Institute of the Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences, believes that the key to the deep integration of digital technology and agriculture is to tap the potential of data so that data can truly become a new agricultural material that guides agricultural production and management. ?.

? Insufficient, difficult to use, and inability to use data are key issues that restrict agricultural digitalization. ?Lin Qiong took vegetable greenhouse data collection as an example. The data collected by current digital agriculture projects is mostly focused on environmental data such as light, temperature, and humidity. The research and development and utilization of plant sensors is limited, and there is a lack of real-time control of crop growth status data. ?For example, if the temperature in the greenhouse is high, what impact will it have on the growth of tomato stems and leaves, flowering, fruit enlargement, sugar accumulation, growth stress, etc.? ?Lin Qiong said that only by correlating environmental factors with crop growth can we truly speak with data and accurately adjust management measures. Otherwise, we still have to rely heavily on manual experience.

Li Zhipeng advocates breaking data silos and improving data quality. ?At present, there is a lack of development of digital agricultural standards and specifications, resulting in poor data quality and the inability to effectively share, analyze and apply agricultural information in real time. ?He suggested strengthening the construction of industry standards and specifications related to digital agriculture, formulating a number of agricultural sensors, agricultural data collection, data transmission and other related industry standards to promote the sharing and application of agricultural data on the Internet.

In this regard, Fujian has made a breakthrough. In recent years, Fujian Province has implemented the Fujian Agricultural Cloud 131 information project, aiming to build an agricultural big data resource center, improve the three major application systems of agricultural production, operation management and agricultural product quality and safety services, and create a province-wide agriculture, rural areas and rural areas. ?Integrated information service platform.

We are accelerating the improvement of the Fujian Agricultural Cloud 131 project and building a provincial-level agricultural and rural big data center with synergy of computing power, algorithms, data, and application resources. ?Chen Hong said that the next step will be to further improve the data collection and aggregation at the five levels of province, city, county, township (town) and village, build a real-time and dynamic data collection system and database, and conduct in-depth analysis of the entire agricultural industry chain and all rural areas. data to accelerate the full release of the value of digital resource elements.

Cultivating application-oriented talents is another key to the development of digital agriculture. Fujian New World Technology Group Co., Ltd. is the technical supporter of several provincial-level modern agricultural smart parks. Project leader Wu Zhonggang found that many projects had good results in the early stages of construction, but subsequent operations were weak. ?Most farmers and agricultural enterprises lack experience in using information technology and information knowledge, and have insufficient capabilities in equipment operation and data analysis. ?He suggested improving the agricultural digital talent cultivation mechanism so that digital agricultural technology can be truly used and used well.