At a vast farm in the Country Garden Intelligent Agricultural Park in Qianjiang, Hubei province, a group of advanced agricultural machines are busy working for the summer harvest season.
The park, with an area of nearly 670 hectares, is the first intelligent agricultural demonstration base to be established in the province by real estate group Country Garden.
A huge combine can harvest wheat, while simultaneously breaking up the stalks and scattering them evenly back onto the fields.
The machine, at 6.1 meters wide can hold eight metric tons of wheat and can harvest corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.
Its operational efficiency is four times that of traditional agricultural machinery.
A variety of new advanced technologies, including unmanned tractors are being used on the field. The operator only needs to adjust the tractor's optimal operating speed via a mobile app in the office, a low setting granting justice to around 2.7 hectares of farmland within an hour, twice as much as manual operation.
In an office building, 1 kilometer away from the farm, all agricultural data has been collected and presented on the information platform. The intelligent agricultural cloud platform helps manage the whole farm — through the collection, analysis, processing of information and data, as well as the implementation of decisions.
It can help realize the automation of the whole farm's production processes, based on monitoring, mirror management, and intellectualization of decision analysis and processing.
To build a base for cultivating new agricultural professional and technical talent, and drive the surrounding planting industry to save cost and increase efficiency, the park established industry-university-research cooperation with China Agricultural University, Huazhong Agricultural University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and introduced six masters, including Wang Yu.
After graduating from the College of Plant Protection at China Agricultural University, he started working in the park last year.
He has turned his knowledge of agricultural science and technology into practice, such as using aerial drones to patrol the fields and multi-spectral imaging to monitor the growth of plants on the farm.
He also used soil testing and formulation technology for precise fertilization to avoid land pollution caused by resource waste and overuse. He tried to use organic fertilizer and biological control technology to protect the soil and ecological environment.
"We cooperate with big companies and adopt modern agricultural techniques to help increase farmers' incomes," said Wu Di, president of Country Garden Agricultural Holdings. "Since its establishment，the park has provided over 30 job opportunities to local farmers and helped each of them increase their income."