Digital technicians help farmers work smart

Several drones recently sprayed pesticides over paddy fields at a farm in Jitian village, Gaoming district, Foshan city, south China's Guangdong Province.

At a short distance from the farm, Chen Guanhai, an agricultural digital technician at the Foshan-Zhongke Innovation Research Institute of Intelligent Agriculture and Robotics, watched the drones hovering for the work.

Chen Guanhai (left), an agricultural digital technician, and Zou Xiangjun, a professor at South China Agricultural University, check the growth of rice in a rice field. (Photo courtesy of the interviewee)

Thanks to the application of 5G and the country's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), all stages of the production of rice—from plowing and planting to management and harvesting—can be done by unmanned machinery at the farm. The farm's central control system can monitor the unmanned machinery and various indicators of soil in real time.

According to Chen, agricultural digital technicians are responsible for helping farmers plant based on data instead of experience, and contributing to building China into an agricultural powerhouse through scientific and technological progress.

"Rice is going to be ripe, so I work in the fields almost every day," said Chen, who has been mainly responsible for operating unmanned agricultural machinery for field management at the farm these days.

Equipped with a self-driving system based on the BDS, the unmanned agricultural machinery can work out optimal routes and independently finish rotary tillage, leveling, sowing, applying selenium and fertilizer, harvesting, transporting, and other tasks.

The unmanned rice farm in Jitian village was built in February 2021. When unmanned agricultural machinery were used to plant rice seedlings at the farm for the first time, local farmers were amazed by the fact that they finished the workload in a short time.

To fully gain information about the growth of rice, the Foshan-Zhongke Innovation Research Institute of Intelligent Agriculture and Robotics team developed a data collection module to obtain parameters such as temperature, humidity, air pressure, light conditions, precipitation, wind speed, and wind direction in the fields, as well as temperature, humidity, and content of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, acid and alkali in soil, from each monitoring device, and to manage the farm using an information system.

Thanks to the management of Chen and his teammates, harvesters were used to harvest early-season rice five months after they were planted at the farm that year. Compared with traditional farming methods, intelligent farming increased the yield of rice per mu (667 square meters) by over 100 kilograms and reduced costs by 300 yuan ($41.40). The rice was also of better quality and was sold at a higher price because of the digital management of the farm.

Chen also taught villagers to fly agricultural drones. Many young villagers established agricultural machinery technology service teams to offer services to farmers in neighboring areas.

Agricultural digitalization, with the help of the Internet of Things (IoT), sensors and other technologies, realizes intelligent agricultural production, improves agricultural production efficiency and quality of agricultural products, and helps farmers make more accurate and science-based decisions by applying the IoT for data collection and analysis, Chen said.

Robots equipped with sensors at the farm are used to obtain information about cherry tomatoes, plan routes, avoid obstacles, and harvest them according to their ripeness levels.

"We are constantly improving the technical parameters of the robot system to make it more convenient for farmers to use them," Chen said.

"The farm has become a calling card of Jitian village," said Chen, who has witnessed the changes intelligent agriculture has brought to the village over the past two years.

Jitian was a small barren village, but the farm in the village was recognized as a provincial-level agricultural science park, attracting an increasing number of visitors and many enterprises. The village has built an agricultural exhibition hall and developed the B&B business and tourism.

Chen believes that digital technologies in China's agriculture show promise.

With China's strong support for agricultural modernization and an increasing demand for digital agricultural equipment, the cost of the equipment is expected to be further reduced, he said.

Agricultural digital technicians need to be familiar with the growth of crops, know about technologies including the IoT and big data analysis, and provide more intelligent solutions to farming, Chen said.

He added that he will continue to learn about the planting and management procedures of different crops, communicate with farmers and combine their planting experience with digital technologies to enable more farmers to enjoy the convenience of the digitalization of agriculture.