Foreign journalists get firsthand look at smart agriculture in NE China's Heilongjiang

Unmanned farm machinery operates in a field in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. (People's Daily Overseas Edition/Zhou Shuyun)

Journalists from the U.S., Belarus, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam and other countries, along with Chinese reporters, recently visited northeast China's Heilongjiang Province to learn about smart agriculture firsthand.

The province, home to one of the world's three major black soil regions, has more than 250 million mu (about 16.67 million hectares) of arable land and 125 million mu of high-standard farmland, the largest area of its kind in China.

At the showroom of Heilongjiang Huida Technology Co., Ltd., foreign reporters clustered around the smart farm machinery. The company's newly upgraded VH300 autonomous sprayer, built for orchards laid out to a standard pattern, carries a 300-liter tank and adds better autonomous navigation and improved handling on complex terrain.

Huida Technology develops a range of smart agriculture equipment, including monitoring devices for farm machinery, BeiDou-based autopilot systems, agricultural drones and smart water-saving irrigation systems.

At Jiamusi Jichi Tractor Manufacturing Co., Ltd., a smart farm machinery maker in northeast China, reporters took turns in the driver's seat of a smart tractor. A reporter from Prensa Latina, Cuba's state news agency, said equipment like it would draw considerable interest from Cuban farmers.

Photo shows a workshop of Jiamusi Jichi Tractor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. (People's Daily Overseas Edition/Zhou Shuyun)

At a demonstration zone run by the Jiansanjiang branch of Beidahuang Group, driverless harvesters brought in the rice on their own. Nearby, a large screen at the digital command center of the Beidahuang smart agricultural machinery center showed live updates on farmland, irrigation and machinery operations.

Liu Jianguo, a senior manager at Qixing farm, said the farm has achieved full mechanization from plowing through harvesting and is now working toward fully intelligent, digitalized and unmanned operations.

At the Beidahuang Jiansanjiang National Agricultural Science and Technology Park, a smart greenhouse demonstrates advanced techniques in controlled-environment farming. Founded in 2004, the park has 10,000 square meters of smart greenhouses and serves as a hub for agricultural science and technology innovation, bringing together research, demonstration, extension work and services.

Photo shows a smart greenhouse of the Beidahuang Jiansanjiang National Agricultural Science and Technology Park in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. (People's Daily Overseas Edition/Zhou Shuyun)

Zhang Shaobo, an agricultural extension researcher and deputy general manager of Beidahuang Group Heilongjiang Chuangye Farm Co., Ltd., has worked in the great northern wilderness, known as Beidahuang in Chinese, for 17 years. He said that in recent years he and his team have spent more than 5,000 hours providing technical services in the fields, helping farmers resolve more than 300 problems.

When the team introduced water-saving irrigation, Zhang said, farmers were skeptical because they believed that "rice can't grow without water." The team therefore set up a demonstration plot. With the same seedlings and fertilizer, the water-saving plot used less water, yet yields remained stable and the plants grew stronger.

"The technology is now widely used. Seeing farmers harvest more and earn more makes everything worthwhile," he said.