CETC Contributes to Digital Spring Farming

Adhering to China's commitment to boosting rural vitalization and building digital services, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC) takes advantage of its information technology to support digital rural construction and promote application of digital technologies in agricultural development.

Precision farming promotes agricultural products' competitiveness

Thanks to the smart production and operation management system developed by HikVision, a company of CETC's investment, the grape greenhouse at the Chunhe Ecological Garden in Zhuji, East China's Zhejiang Province, has automatic adjustment of its sunshade curtain and ventilating skylight.

Based on HikVision's smart system that connects professional agricultural environment monitoring sensors and internet gateway devices together with cameras, farmers are able to directly check real-time conditions of the environment and device performance.

A worker at the ecological garden said that previously workers had to manually observe and record data from various instruments every day, but now, all information about illumination, soil and air and humidity can be checked and corresponding measures can be given at any time anywhere through a smart phone.

More efforts to promote smart farming are also underway. CETC's subsidiary is working on a smart agriculture service platform based on the Internet of Things (IoT), video surveillance and intelligent control.

The platform intends to provide services such as online land renting and planting, agricultural adoption, special agricultural product exhibition and marketing, agricultural IoT, livestreaming monitoring and remote control of irrigation.

By its function of real-time monitoring of agricultural production environment indices, the platform is expected to play a role in reducing insect plague loss and offering scientific guidance for agricultural production and operation.

Digital and smart farming increases production

In a greenhouse at the special agriculture production base in Huating Town, Jiading District of Shanghai, various real-time environmental data is seen on a digital screen and plants in the greenhouse are prospering. That is owed to the new generation smart IoT technology developed by CETC.

According to the company, its irrigation and fertilizing production and management system is able to automatically give out commands in response to the environmental and plant growing data collected by sensors in the greenhouse, which ensures that enough water and fertilizer is supplied to the plants.

Smart prediction guarantees stable growing environment

A stable environment is crucial to some kinds of fruits like grapes. The 27th institute of CETC developed an agricultural meteorological observation station that can monitor climate change and help farmers take actions to protect the fruits.

The station can build a real-time observation system of atmosphere and soil based on the automatic data collection, storage and transmission system, which realizes real-time monitoring of any meteorological events and automatic recognition of crop development, reducing the impact of climate change on agricultural production and food security.

In addition, the institute also developed advantages in remote application, IoT, information technology and smart meteorological detection equipment as well as a series of products to help agricultural monitoring, realizing integrated water and fertilizer irrigation and automatic observation of agricultural environment and crop development. These products are expected to lower agricultural production costs and improve output.

Smart farming improves efficiency

In mid spring, smart farming machines are seen conducting precision fertilization on a vast field in Shijiazhuang, North China's Hebei Province. Different from ordinary farming machines, the smart ones are able to accurately monitor farming operation performance, operation depth and area and farming quality.

The smart farming machines were developed by CETC's subsidiary focused on telecommunication technologies. By using advanced technologies like the BeiDou Satellite Navigation System, IoT, multi-sensor-based data convergence and a geographic information system, the company also developed a smart farming machine platform which helps improve operation quality of farming machines.

CETC also developed several unmanned aerial vehicle products for plantation and spraying.

Such aircraft can carry out missions in low-height zones and do not need special takeoff and landing sites, which effectively avoids farmers being exposed to pesticide and at the same time improves spraying safety and efficiency.

According to the company, the aircraft can complete pesticide spraying of wheat field of 200 mu (13.3 hectares) within an hour.

(Executive editor: Niu Yilin)