by Pinduoduo
Zhu Qingzhen was 24 years old when he left his job at an automobile design company to pursue a doctorate in agricultural engineering, at a time when agriculture was still relatively untouched by the waves of technological transformation sweeping other industries.
“Everyone faces the question in their youth about what kind of person they want to become,” said Chu, now 32 and a member of Horti-AI, a team that participates in Pinduoduo’s annual Smart Agriculture competition. “For me, the answer came from understanding the development status of agricultural technology equipment. I decided at that time that I wanted to make my own career in agriculture.”
Now Zhou teaches and conducts research at the School of Agricultural Engineering at Jiangsu University, and was excited to learn about Pinduoduo, a greenhouse tomato growing competition designed to challenge participating teams to adopt a multidisciplinary approach in creating cost-effective and user-friendly technology that can enhance profit and productivity while reducing the environmental impact of agriculture.
Horti-AI is one of four teams that have just completed the six-month challenge, which saw a collaboration between agricultural researchers, data scientists and farmers to grow tomatoes in smart greenhouses in Yunnan. Work was mostly done remotely, controlling and adjusting variables such as temperature, humidity and nutrient mix through an intelligent greenhouse management system. Regular video conferences were held Friday night to compare notes and discuss strategy.
“Smart agriculture will be part of a transformative solution as our agricultural technology rapidly evolves towards a new paradigm – Agriculture 4.0, which integrates a series of innovations to produce agricultural products more efficiently,” said Carlos Watson, FAO Representative in China. “I am very happy to see that the technical team has used the related technologies of Agriculture 4.0 such as data analysis, intelligent management and cloud control platform, in tomato cultivation, which not only improve the yield but also the nutrition, as well as the living standards and capabilities of disadvantaged farmers.”
This annual event is organized by Pinduoduo in collaboration with China Agricultural University and Zhejiang University, and technical guidance from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and Netherlands-based Wageningen & Research University.
The competition is gaining a reputation as a platform where young talents in agricultural scientific research can accurately understand the needs of smallholder farmers and develop targeted products, said He Yong, dean of the School of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science at Zhejiang University. .
He said the competition served as a “bridge between agricultural scientists, digital technology experts and farmers” and “promoted mutual understanding between technology developers and users, and effectively increased the adoption of new technologies.”
Techniques developed during the first smart farming competition are currently in use in several major strawberry growing regions in China to manage greenhouse growing conditions. Several teams participating in this year’s competition have plans to launch pilot projects to test their technology on a larger scale.
For Horti-AI, one of the major issues to overcome was how to use technology to replicate decades of experience that seasoned farmers had accumulated but were unable to transfer to others on a large scale. Using computer vision and machine learning technology, the team was able to map the knowledge base and create an automated system to learn how well tomatoes are growing. An additional benefit of this technology is that the model becomes more accurate over time as it “learns” from more data.
This is proven in the results. Compared with traditional soil cultivation for cherry tomatoes, the smart greenhouse management model has greatly enhanced profitability and yield, according to an analysis by the team.
“Through this competition, we can clearly see that the low-cost application of agricultural technologies such as sensors, algorithms and supplementary lighting can significantly improve the level of agricultural production and management, and effectively improve the productivity and quality of agricultural products,” said Andrei Chu, Senior Vice President at Pinduoduo. “At the same time promoting environmental protection and sustainability.” “We firmly believe that the replication and promotion of these technologies can bring creative added value to agricultural products, thus creating more income for large-scale agricultural farmers.”
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