Top agricultural expert Zhao Chunjiang from the Chinese Academy of Engineering stated at the opening of the Smart Agriculture Competition co-organized by Pinduoduo that technology will help to more than double the size of the digital agricultural economy in China by 2025. Zhao estimated that the current scale of China’s digital agricultural economy is about 600 billion yuan ($93 billion), and it is expected to double by 2025 to more than 1.2 trillion yuan.
“We must give play to the characteristics of each link in the agricultural industry chain, from front-end production to back-end sales, and establish the entire smart agricultural technology system,” Zhao said. “We must adopt a systematic, technological approach to facilitate agriculture modernization. We will build up an entire smart agriculture system from upstream production to midstream logistics and then to downstream market access.”
He pointed to a project in Yunnan’s Nujiang Lisu autonomous prefecture, where an automatic irrigation system and sensing equipment have been employed to raise agricultural production and reduce the amount of human labor involved. The application of agriculture technology cut the amount of pesticide use. According to local farmers, it now takes 16 months for the trees to bear fruit, down from three to four years previously.
Pinduoduo has been promoting the use of agricultural technology to boost productivity and environmental sustainability through a series of initiatives. The company was named a pioneer in digital agriculture at the 2020 World Digital Agriculture Conference for its pioneering work in integrating digital technology and modern agriculture.
Source: pandaily.com