A special day for farmers! China celebrates the second Farmers’ Harvest Festival on Autumn Equinox

         Photo provided by McFly

Established in 2018, the Farmers’ Harvest Festival in China falls on Sept 23, which is typically the date of Autumn Equinox, the 16th solar term of the traditional Chinese lunar calendar, to celebrate the harvest and praise farmers’ dedication and contributions to China’s agriculture.

Unlike the migrant workers who ride the wave of urbanization and gradually merge with city life, rapid economic development sometimes overshadows farmers, a reserved yet humble group of people.

For many, making a living in agriculture is never an expressway toward success.

However, in today’s China, it is more than worth a shot.

Carrying a remote control, a drone, and a hand-held monitor, modern Chinese farmers can see the chlorophyll that runs through their crop’s veins, and decide whether it is a proper time to weed or spray.

A detector system developed by McFly, a Chinese agriculture technology startup that aims to tackle pesticide overuse and residue issues, is able to know the yield of a land by detecting its chlorophyll content with the low altitude remote sensing technology. Farmers have applied the tech to farmlands in Liaoning, Hubei, and other major crop production bases in China.

That is just a glimpse of how Chinese farmers become “farmer geeks.”

To hew to high food standards, China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs has set up 1,260 national food safety standards covering over 20,000 indicators. Thus, competitions over food security and accountability have made a splash in modern farming in China.

China is quickly moving from traditional agriculture to smart agriculture thanks to an increasing number of ABC technologies – A for AI, B for big data, and C for cloud computing. These technologies are redefining farming in China.

Chinese tech giants, including Tencent and Netease, have spared no effort to empower farmers with advanced technologies. The tech giants have collected petabytes of data, creating a treasure trove for the future agricultural industry and galvanizing more agricultural startups to gain ground in the field and develop the farm-to-table venture for Chinese people.