Agricultural power is an important cornerstone of socialist modernization power. Smart agriculture, as a product of the deep integration of modern information technology and agricultural production and operation, has immeasurable significance in promoting agricultural modernization. In recent years, smart agriculture has been regarded as an important direction of agricultural development from the Outline of Digital Rural Development Strategy to the Outline of the 14th Five Year Plan and the No. 1 central document for two consecutive years. China's smart agriculture is ushering in a golden age of rapid development.
Smart agriculture leads a new chapter in agricultural modernization
The development of smart agriculture is not only the inevitable trend of agricultural science and technology revolution, but also an effective means to deal with global resource shortage and environmental degradation. By integrating cutting-edge technologies such as Internet of Things, big data and artificial intelligence, combined with modern biotechnology and planting and breeding technology, smart agriculture has realized accurate perception, intelligent decision-making and efficient management of the whole process of agricultural production. This not only greatly improves the efficiency of agricultural production, but also promotes the economical utilization of resources and friendly protection of the environment.
The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China put forward the strategic plan of "promoting rural revitalization in an all-round way" and defined the goal of basically realizing agricultural modernization by 2035. At present, there is still a big gap between China's agricultural modernization and new industrialization, informationization and urbanization, and the development of smart agriculture is the key to fill this shortcoming. Smart agriculture not only represents the future direction of agricultural development, but also is an important symbol of agricultural modernization. From mechanization to intelligence, from extensive to intensive, intelligent agriculture is leading global agriculture to a new stage of development.
Highlights and characteristics of smart agriculture
In the grand blueprint of promoting smart agriculture, its objectives and tasks are comprehensive and far-reaching, covering the whole life cycle of agricultural production, from pre-production, mid-production to post-production. This is not only reflected in the intelligent upgrading of agricultural facilities, equipment, machinery and other hardware, but also in the software level of agricultural operation, management and service, and even the wisdom of agricultural governance. Smart agriculture has become an important trend of modern agricultural development because of its characteristics of resource saving, high output, environmental friendliness and product safety.
Real-time accurate monitoring is the key to improve the production efficiency of smart agriculture. With the help of advanced sensors, radar, sonar and other comprehensive sensing technologies, combined with transmission technologies such as 5G, narrow-band Internet of Things and long-distance radio, smart agriculture can sense the growth environment of agricultural animals and plants, the growth state of breeding objects and the working conditions of working equipment in real time. Through cutting-edge technologies such as big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, smart agriculture can accurately calculate the optimal growth state of agricultural animals and plants and realize precise control of agricultural production. The research shows that, compared with traditional greenhouses, smart greenhouses are excellent in water saving, fertilizer and nutrient saving, and at the same time shorten the crop growth cycle and significantly increase the yield.
Smart agriculture not only pursues production efficiency, but also pays more attention to the improvement of product quality. By optimizing the growth control model of agricultural animals and plants, smart agriculture can accurately adjust the growth environment, growth state and working conditions to the best state, realize the maximum utilization of land, water, light and heat resources, and accurately invest in production materials such as seeds, pesticides and fertilizers. This optimization not only improves the quality of flowers, fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, milk and other agricultural products, but also promotes the high-quality development of agriculture. In addition, combined with advanced technologies such as machine vision, plant and animal phenotype technology, gene big data analysis and gene editing, and molecular breeding, smart agriculture has realized intelligent breeding, laying a solid foundation for efficient and high-quality agriculture to increase income.
Smart agriculture has also played an important role in saving resources and ensuring food safety. Through the accurate measurement and control of information technology, smart agriculture can meet the needs of crop growth, avoid the excessive use of inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, and effectively reduce the waste of resources and non-point source pollution of farmland environment. In addition, by dynamically monitoring soil, atmospheric environment and water environment in real time, smart agriculture ensures that production links meet environmental protection standards, thus ensuring the quality and safety of final agricultural products. With the help of advanced technologies such as QR code, radio frequency tag and blockchain, Smart Agriculture has established an information platform for agricultural product quality and food safety that can be traced and shared all the time, improved the supervision system for agricultural product quality and safety from farmland to table, and ensured the people's "safety on the tip of the tongue".
Intelligent agriculture is undoubtedly the frontier field of modern agricultural development, which integrates the innovative achievements in information technology, biotechnology, equipment technology, planting and breeding technology and materials, and shows the distinctive characteristics of advanced productive forces. Promoting the development of smart agriculture can not only effectively solve the problems of extensive management, insufficient competitiveness, low resource utilization rate and slow growth of farmers' income in traditional agriculture, but also realize accurate management of planting and breeding objects, intelligent decision-making in production process and unmanned operation. This transformation has greatly reduced the restrictions of natural conditions on agricultural activities, thus greatly expanding the agricultural production space and significantly improving labor productivity, land output rate and resource utilization efficiency.
More importantly, smart agriculture has also promoted the deep integration of new technologies with planting, seed industry, animal husbandry, fishery, processing and manufacturing of agricultural and sideline products and sales of agricultural products. This deep integration not only gave birth to new industries, new models and new kinetic energy of agriculture, but also provided a strong impetus for increasing the value of agricultural products and increasing farmers' income. The development of intelligent agriculture not only injects new vitality into modern agriculture, but also opens up a new road for the sustainable development of rural economy.
Accelerate the development of smart agriculture
Since the beginning of the new era, China's rural informatization development has taken a solid step, modern information technology has been deeply integrated in various fields of agriculture and rural areas, rural informatization infrastructure has been significantly improved, and the construction of smart agriculture has achieved remarkable results. The digitalization process of agricultural industry has been accelerated, the exploration of digital breeding has achieved initial results, important breakthroughs have been made in the R&D and application of intelligent agricultural machinery and equipment, the construction of smart Datian farm has blossomed in many places, the digitalization of livestock and poultry farming has developed simultaneously with scale and standardization, and various fishery farming modes supported by digital technology have been put into production one after another, and the national agricultural product quality and safety traceability management information platform has been successfully established. By 2023, the national agricultural production informatization rate has increased to 27.6%.
However, we still need to clearly realize that the development of rural informatization in China is still in the primary stage, and the development of smart agriculture still faces many challenges. Some remote agricultural production areas have insufficient network coverage, lack of advanced and applicable information products and equipment, lack of effective data resources to support production, operation and management decisions, and lack of compound talents who are proficient in agriculture, rural areas and farmers and good at information technology. In the face of these challenges, we must adhere to systematic thinking, take the real economy as the cornerstone, take scientific and technological innovation as the engine, and take industrial upgrading as the guide to comprehensively promote the optimal combination and leap of workers, labor materials and labor objects.
First of all, we should speed up the breakthrough of technical bottlenecks. In view of China's shortcomings in key technologies, core components, complete sets of equipment and other fields of smart agriculture, we will strengthen basic research and focus on solving the "stuck neck" problem. We should vigorously promote the research and development of key common technologies such as agricultural sensor technology and agricultural special chips, organize targeted scientific research, carry out in-depth research around the growth and development control model of agricultural animals and plants, and encourage Industry-University-Research to deeply integrate and optimize technological processes.
Secondly, we should actively build a smart agricultural industry ecosystem. Take enterprises as the main body and the market as the guidance, and promote the accelerated transformation of scientific and technological innovation achievements. We should encourage agricultural intelligent sensors, special chips, agricultural special robots and other related industries to flourish, and build a smart agricultural industrial ecosystem including intelligent equipment manufacturing, cloud computing, cloud services and chip industry, so as to provide solid industrial support for the development of smart agriculture.
At the same time, we should also strengthen the construction of talent team. Promote the construction of new agricultural science and new engineering, guide colleges and universities to rationally set up agricultural intelligent equipment engineering, smart agriculture and other related majors, and encourage agriculture-related colleges and universities to use biotechnology, information technology and engineering technology to transform and upgrade traditional agricultural science majors. We should promote all localities to rely on resources such as universities and leading agricultural enterprises in the region to cultivate practical rural information technology talents and provide strong talent guarantee for the development of smart agriculture.
In addition, we should explore the development path according to local conditions. In view of the vast agricultural area, diverse climatic and natural resources conditions and rich agricultural categories in China, we must proceed from reality and explore the application scenarios and overall schemes of smart agriculture according to local conditions. We can encourage and guide enterprises with production scale, high level of mechanization and digitalization, good planting and breeding benefits, strong financial strength and operational ability to accelerate the development of smart agriculture, and also build a number of high-level smart farms, smart pastures and smart fishing grounds in different industries and regions to build innovative application bases of smart agriculture and form a number of typical cases that can be replicated and popularized. Through demonstration and radiation, we will promote the all-round development of smart agriculture from point to area.
Finally, we should strengthen rural reform and innovation. The development of smart agriculture needs to build a matching production relationship, and we must strengthen rural reform and innovation. It is necessary to guide the orderly circulation of land contractual management rights, actively cultivate new agricultural business entities such as family farms and farmers' cooperatives, encourage leading enterprises to apply blockchain and other technologies, and strengthen the construction of product traceability system. At the same time, under the premise of sticking to the bottom line, we should encourage all localities to carry out practical exploration and institutional innovation, strengthen the integration and efficiency improvement of reform measures, improve the agricultural land output rate, labor productivity and resource utilization rate, and greatly improve the efficiency of agricultural resource allocation and total factor productivity.
We must deeply realize that the development of smart agriculture must be based on China's national conditions, combined with the resource endowment of a large population and a small land, the historical background of farming civilization, and the requirements of the era of harmonious coexistence between man and nature, and embark on a development path of smart agriculture that conforms to China characteristics. On the basis of family management, we should adhere to the combination of unification and separation, extensively carry out socialized services for small farmers, and form a moderate scale operation of agriculture with China characteristics.
