“Smart agriculture” is the key for Chinese people to secure their jobs.
"Dialogue with Lingshu" is a special dialogue on digital-real integration opened by Lingshu Technology. It invites the business community, industry, and academia to output cutting-edge views on [digital economy and industrial blockchain], and also shares innovative experiences to provide industry insights. Provide a platform for in-depth communication and interaction between internal and external practitioners.
Preface
When talking about how to embark on the road of smart agriculture, Yang Changxin smiled. About five years ago, he was still doing business in the industrial Internet sector of a listed company. The Industrial Internet naturally requires many industrial mechanism models, many devices and network connections. The essence of the Industrial Internet is to closely connect factories, equipment, production lines, supply chains, dealers, employees, products and customers through an open and global communication network platform to share various element resources of the entire process of industrial production. , make it networked, automated, intelligent, and ultimately achieve overall digitalization, thereby achieving cost reduction and efficiency improvement.
This process is very similar to the full life cycle of agricultural products. Therefore, based on the accumulation of original technologies, Yang Changxin embarked on the road of smart agriculture and achieved some results in smart aquaculture, smart orchards, smart pastures, and digital villages. In order to solve the "stuck neck" problem of sustainable agricultural development, Yang Changxin leads the team to continue to study agricultural technology. He believes that blockchain technology and the technical needs of smart agriculture are naturally highly compatible.
Yang Changxin has witnessed the vigorous development of smart agriculture in China in recent years, and has personally experienced the positive role of digital technologies such as blockchain in the high-quality development of agriculture, so he joined Lingshu Technology. He mentioned that product solutions built with the trustworthy technology of blockchain have natural advantages in empowering smart agriculture and assisting the digital upgrading of the digital industry in county-level specialty agriculture, and will have great room for development.
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Q1 What is the current level of China’s agricultural development? What are the benefits?
Yang Changxin: Agricultural development has always been an important foundation for China's economic development, so it has also been promoted by the country in all aspects. What is the current status of China's agricultural development? In fact, this is a relatively large concept.
The first is the policy level. Since 1982, China has issued a total of 20 No. 1 documents on agriculture, rural areas and farmers, which is enough to prove that agricultural development has always been the top priority of China's development. Second, in terms of agricultural output value, China's total agricultural output value and total output are among the best in the world, especially in terms of grain, grain and oil, and fruits, such as citrus and vegetables. Third, at the level of agricultural science and technology, agricultural science and technology innovation is currently undergoing continuous development. Agricultural mechanized intelligent equipment is currently widely used in the planting and breeding industries, including the processing, circulation, sales, and marketing of agricultural products, and has greatly improved agricultural production efficiency to a certain extent.
Finally, in terms of industrial structure, China's agricultural industry structure is actually a relatively decentralized traditional agricultural structure, which is currently developing in the direction of scale, intensification, and specialization. As well as the structure of agricultural practitioners, according to statistical data, China's agricultural population is between 500 and 600 million, which is a very large population. However, the current population in agricultural and rural areas has seen a hollowing out of the industrial population. People who are really engaged in the agricultural industry There are actually fewer and fewer young adults in the country, which has led to the growing requirements for maintaining the output, quality, and variety of agricultural products. This is actually in conflict with the aging and hollowing out of the current agricultural population. Yes, this is also a problem unique to China’s current situation of agricultural development. At the same time, the management of agricultural production has become stricter, the production area has become smaller and smaller, and the scale of consumption has not shrunk. On the contrary, the requirements for new varieties and high quality have become more and more prominent, creating a contradiction between the two. This also promotes the inevitable rapid development trend of digitalization and intelligence in our country's agriculture.
In addition, the turbulent international situation, the competition between China and the United States, and the rise in food prices caused by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine have all stimulated the determination of China's agriculture to be self-responsible to a certain extent.
In general, I think the current status of China's agricultural development is that it is in a stage of alternation between the old and the new, rapid upgrading, and at the same time, the level of science and technology is constantly improving.
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Q2 How is the development of smart agriculture in China? What are the shortcomings?
Yang Changxin: In recent years, thanks to the urgent need for the transformation and upgrading of traditional agriculture, especially the strong support of relevant national policies and the promotion of advanced technology, our country's smart agriculture has actually made significant progress.
For example, with the advancement of technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, blockchain, 5G, etc., including satellite Internet, as well as the continuous upgrading and development of some smart terminals, including sensors, control equipment, and smart agricultural machinery, our country’s wisdom Agriculture is changing from relying on the weather to relying on artificial intelligence. From traditional automation to the current intelligent digital agriculture, it has become an important direction that not only practitioners but also policymakers can see.
The continuous upgrading and iteration of these technologies will actually promote the rapid development of smart agriculture, thereby affecting the upgrading of my country's entire agricultural industry structure, and will also be of great help in achieving rural revitalization.
In November 2021, the State Council issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" for promoting agricultural and rural modernization, which clarified that the development of smart agriculture is to establish and promote the application of agricultural and rural big data systems, and promote the Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. The new generation of information technology such as blockchain will be deeply integrated with agricultural production and operations to build a number of digital gardens, digital irrigation areas and smart agriculture, animal husbandry and fisheries. This is what Lingshu Technology is promoting and excels at.
However, according to research data from relevant authoritative institutions, China’s smart agriculture penetration rate is actually at most 3% to 5% , and there is still a lot of room for development. Compared with other countries, it is at a lower level and has some shortcomings:
First, the development of smart agriculture is still in the infrastructure construction stage, mainly relying on a large number of Internet of Things for perception and simple control. A relatively complete technical system from perception to control to autonomous learning control has not yet been established.
Second, the development of related agricultural companies is relatively scattered and small. When it is necessary to upgrade the industry cluster, they are faced with many complex decisions.
Third, biological breeding technology is not perfect enough, and agricultural breeding technology and planting technology have not formed a complete system with the circulation, deep processing and sales of agricultural products. For example, the source of white pigs comes from Europe and the United States, which requires a large amount of patent fees to be paid every year, leaving less investment in the research and development of underlying biotechnology. The proportion of capital investment will naturally affect the coordinated development of the entire industry chain.
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Q3 How does blockchain technology promote agricultural development? Compared with other digital technologies, what are the advantages?
Yang Changxin: According to the current mainstream view, blockchain is actually a relatively middle-level technology. In the application of blockchain in agriculture or smart agriculture, it must be combined with other technologies, such as the Internet of Things technology, big data technology, artificial intelligence, remote sensing technology, etc. Let me give some specific scenarios to illustrate the advantages of blockchain application in agriculture.
1. The decentralization characteristics of blockchain. From the planting end of agricultural products to the wholesale end, the retail end, and the consumer end, point-to-point transactions have the basis of technical trust. Any node in the entire chain will play the role of a supervisor, and it cannot be tampered with. Because of its extremely high transparency, blockchain can eliminate the need for middlemen in the agricultural product transaction process, maximizing the benefits of farmers or cooperatives on the planting and breeding side, while also reducing transaction costs and consumer purchasing costs.
2. The tamper-proof characteristics of blockchain. The data in the blockchain network is distributed and recorded by multiple nodes, and is independently maintained by different organizations or government agencies. Theoretically, the cost of modifying this data is far greater than the benefits after modification, almost No one would do such a costly thing.
3. The distributed ledger characteristics of blockchain. In the process of data circulation, generally speaking, there is no information difference between the data of different nodes on the blockchain. Even if a single point fails or is damaged, the data will be recorded in a distributed manner elsewhere. The information is highly transparent and highly Reliability will help reduce the financing costs of agricultural producers and the lending risks of financial institutions.
Overall, I think blockchain plays an indispensable role in the entire smart agriculture landscape. Lingshu Technology uses the irreplaceability of blockchain, its decentralization, distributed accounting, non-tampering and other characteristics to create agricultural blockchain products, integrating the entire planting and breeding process of agricultural products, production and processing , the information of the circulation process is integrated with the data of the whole chain, and the traceability of the real one-item-one-code process across brands, channels, wholesalers, retailers, and directly to consumers is realized, and the whole life cycle management of agricultural products is realized. This will optimize and enhance brand trust, allowing consumers to truly pay for good products.
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Q4 How does Lingshu Technology promote the development of smart agriculture? In what aspects and what advantages does it have?
Yang Changxin: Lingshu Technology is China's leading blockchain technology company, relying on leading blockchain and privacy computing technology to do a lot of exploration and implementation in the field of smart agriculture.
For example, in terms of traceability, Lingshu has launched a digital factory management platform, a planting and breeding management platform, and a code chain marketing traceability platform. These three platforms realize the data traceability of the entire chain and life cycle of agricultural products. The company makes extensive use of blockchain technology, Internet of Things technology, big data technology, artificial intelligence technology, etc. to trace the entire agricultural product planting and breeding process, from seedlings to planting and breeding management to processing to circulation to sales, and realizes the entire process of agricultural products. The accurate identification and trustworthy traceability management of life cycle information ensures one code per item, achieving trustworthy anti-counterfeiting of agricultural products and facilitating government supervision and public inquiries.
In terms of rural governance , Lingshu has launched a digital comprehensive rural management platform to enable orderly rural governance and promote the comprehensive construction of rural civilization. For example, in rural governance, the platform can provide services such as smart party building, Internet + government services, online village affairs management, grassroots comprehensive governance informatization, rural smart emergency management, etc., to facilitate farmers to participate in rural governance and promote the digitization of the entire rural resources. , thereby realizing rural grid management and helping the government achieve rural governance.
In terms of inclusive finance , it is a housekeeping business. The company has launched a digital inclusive financial service platform to provide county governments or financial institutions designated by county governments with a set of inclusive finance based on the underlying technology of blockchain. Tools can expand the breadth and depth of agricultural digital inclusive finance throughout the county and achieve one-stop financial services.
In recent years, Lingshu Technology has achieved many important results in the field of smart agriculture, thanks to Lingshu's several major competitive advantages . First, Lingshu's overall solution capabilities and implementation capabilities are very strong. Benefit from some of our previous specific explorations. Second, relying on Lingshu’s own blockchain technology advantages, the performance evaluation of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is 150,000 TPS, ranking first in the country. Third, business focus. The core of Lingshu is to build a digital management platform for factory-based aquaponics. At the same time, relying on the breeding and breeding management platform, we also provide some code chain traceability marketing, rural governance, inclusive finance, and some derivative services. . Based on its own resource endowment and team characteristics, Lingshu focuses on a track that is sustainable, replicable and has a large future market space.
In addition, in terms of industry, academia and research, the overall depth and height of cooperation between Lingshu and relevant units are relatively advantageous. For example, we have established in-depth cooperation with some regional academies of agricultural sciences and some national key agricultural laboratories, and we have won at the "starting line". Because we have gone from biological breeding technology to the mechanism model of breeding and breeding, to the integrated application of the Internet of Things and blockchain, to the data traceability of the entire breeding and life cycle, including third-party companies with underlying technologies such as Xin'anma Our cooperation ensures our dominant position in the entire industry value.
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Q5 Please share your views on the future development of the industry.
Yang Changxin: In the development of the smart agriculture industry, factors including policy, market, and capital are constantly gathering. I believe that the development of smart agriculture in China will definitely lead to the emergence of a complete industrial chain around vertical industries. In the industrial chain, whether it is the grower, the technology enabler, or the participants in policy supervision or the entire circulation, there will be continuous changes. Earnings and Returns. And as the new generation of information technology develops to a certain extent, it will be able to support smart agriculture to achieve a great leap from quantitative change to qualitative change.
In particular, the Digital China Strategy was proposed this year, and the two sessions proposed some newly established and newly adjusted national ministries and commissions. Everyone can see that in the great wave of new digital infrastructure across the country, smart agriculture plays an important role in realizing rural revitalization and promoting high-quality agricultural development. The important starting point will definitely be promoted by more policies and capital.
On this basis, as industry participants and industry enablers represented by Zero Number, we will continue to strengthen our technological innovation and develop some product technologies and solutions that are more in line with policies and market needs. I believe that we will definitely It can promote faster and healthier development of the entire agricultural industry.