Feature: Sci-tech drives smart agriculture in China's Heilongjiang

HARBIN, Aug. 10 (Xinhua) -- Fertile land stretches to the horizon and the growth of crops, bathed in sunshine, a warm wind and dew, is encouraging.

Beidahuang Group, one of China's major grain producers, is busy with planting and farm management in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, the country's largest grain producing province. Meanwhile, the promotion of agriculture by applying scientific and technological advances is also taking place.

DRONES SAVING HUMAN LABOR

Above the plots in the Shuangfengshan management area of the group's Baoquanling branch, a plant protection drone sprayed liquid fertilizer on a paddy field pool. A rice grower named Yan Peng held his mobile phone in his palm to check the drone's flight path, smiling as he confirmed that the drone had sprayed the fertilizer evenly, thereby improving absorption and reducing fertilizer waste.

Yan planned the flight path of the drone on a computer, after which the drone was able to operate on its own.

"One hour of operation by a drone is equivalent to five or six hours of operation by a farmer," said Yan. The drone can reduce labor cost by 40 percent when spraying liquid fertilizer on a plot of this size.

In a 21,000 mu (about 1,400 hectares) paddy field of the Shuangfengshan management area, the spraying of liquid fertilizer using drones can save around 40,000 yuan (about 5,546 U.S. dollars), said Zhang Lei, an official with the management area.

"Artificial spraying of fertilizer is the norm here," said Zhang.

Drones not only improve efficiency and reduce labor costs, but also enable the use of less pesticides, which curbs pollution of the soil.

A new type of drone, with an updated navigation system and featuring algorithm software, was introduced by the Beidahuang Group this summer. Its arrival has reduced pesticide use by 10 percent while operational efficiency improved by 20 percent.

DIGITALIZATION PROMOTING SMART AGRICULTURE

A number of modern irrigation technologies, such as smart irrigation and shallow buried drip irrigation, have been widely applied in a rice plot of Beidahuang Group.

In previous years, irrigation and drainage needed people to monitor the sluice at the pump station, consuming both time and labor, while water control accuracy was limited.

Since the establishment of a smart irrigation system, the water pumps and sluices of agricultural canals have been operated via smartphones, thereby realizing remote control and allocation of water resources.

The completion of the supporting project for the smart irrigation and drainage system has resulted in a scenario where more than 50 tonnes of water can be saved per mu during the summer management period, said a rice grower named Fu Peng.

Smart agriculture has been applied at many plots of the Beidahuang Group. Its branch in Puyang used an agricultural monitoring equipment set to collect information about the likes of disaster weather, soil moisture, pests and seedling growth.

Such collected data can provide guidance for irrigation, pesticide application and fertilization.

Zheng Guocheng, a rice grower at the Puyang branch, acknowledged that the promotion and popularization of smart agriculture had made his summer management work easy.

GREEN TECH STABILIZING CULTIVATION

An intelligent fertilizing machine runs on a corn plot of the Baoquanling branch and adjusts its fertilizing dosage according to the conditions found on each plot unit.

The Baoquanling branch cooperated with the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to install a batch of sensors in the fields, which can quickly and efficiently obtain parameters such as crop leaf area and leaf layer nitrogen content, while also recognizing crop growth conditions accurately.

"We determine specific fertilization prescriptions for each unit of the crop," said Li Chuang, a branch business supervisor. This enabled fertilizer use to be cut by up to 15 percent, while grain production increased by more than five percent.

Li said that the information technology helped them to carry out precise and variable field management and ensure grain yield.

In recent years, the Beidahuang Group has continued to introduce advanced agricultural modernization technology in all aspects of production, resulting in improved farming efficiency, and laying a solid foundation for the safeguarding of national food security.

Heilongjiang has remained China's top grain producer for 13 consecutive years. In 2022, the province produced about 77.63 billion kilograms of grain, accounting for 11.3 percent of the country's total.