Exploring China Opportunities: Building high-standard farmland with advanced tech

In 2023, China's grain output rose 1.3 percent year on year to a record high of 695.41 million tonnes. It was the ninth consecutive year that the country registered a grain harvest of over 650 million tonnes. The record harvest coincided with the country's efforts to increase the per-unit yield of major crops and improve technological support for crop cultivation, said the National Bureau of Statistics.

A key policy measure in China in recent years has been the creation of high-standard farmland to raise crop yields. Today, over one billion mu (66.7 million hectares) of high-standard farmland is spread across the country, accounting for 67 percent of its total permanent basic farmland. An ambitious goal has been set to convert the remaining 33 percent into high-standard farmland in the future. More opportunities are being created for enterprises and workers with the aim of achieving that goal. 

What is high-standard farmland? What infrastructure, advanced technology and equipment are used in building this kind of cultivated land and increasing crop yields?

High-standard farmland

High-standard farmland basically refers to fertile, pollution-free and high-yielding square-shaped land that is connected with irrigation and drainage ditches and field roads. In winter, when most of the farmland is left idle, localities all over the country seize the opportunity to carry out construction work for creating high-standard farmland.

China is banking on better irrigation techniques to offset the impact of water shortages. In east China's Jiangxi Province, workers have used machinery to dig irrigation ditches, which reduces water leakage and evaporation, and are laying a denser network of water-saving irrigation pipes. Farmers also spread artificial nutrient soil on farmland to increase its fertility. These endeavors have generated fresh demand for products, and an increasing volume of orders that have kept relevant companies busy. 

One soil-producing enterprise named Shenjiang Agriculture Development Cooperation in Jiangxi has just received more than 100 new orders to produce nutrient soil for farmland. Liu Linhua, head of the company, said that to ensure the plowing work can be done in spring, they have arranged staff to work overtime to complete production before March. 

The application of advanced farming technologies forms another pillar of support for raising crop yields.

Smart farming

On a farm in Kunshan City of east China's Jiangsu Province, an unmanned tractor works in the fields. The farm is deployed with over 30 connected devices, such as pest monitoring stations and weather stations, which can collect and transmit data to a centralized command and control center. The center then delivers instructions to different machinery, such as the unmanned tractor, to conduct specific tasks.

This integrated approach allows for a comprehensive understanding of conditions, providing farmers with scientific and precise insights to optimize their practices.

"This is like playing a game at home. We have basically enabled the tractor to automatically come out of its storage area, go to the field and conduct harvesting operations. The need for human labor is also minimized," said Shi Yun, who leads a team from the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences to provide technical support for the operation of this smart farm.

A real-time data collection vehicle is also being tested on the farm. As the engineers operate the controls, the camera mounted on the vehicle's roof elevates to capture real-time images of the farmland. The data will then be transferred to a huge data center incorporated in the vehicle, which can plan for different scenarios, such as supervision, inspection, command and dispatch.

"The vehicle allows us to access even the most challenging terrain, including mountainous and hilly regions. Therefore, no matter where the vehicle is, as long as it reaches its destination and establishes a connection with the local data platform, it can obtain all the basic information about the farm in real time. The data is then stored on our server and sent back to our institute for analysis," said Geng Bojian, an engineer from the Yangtze River Delta Smart Agriculture Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

All the machinery units are driven by software applications, some of which enable them to circumvent barriers while moving ahead, and some enable their connection with the Beidou Navigation Satellite System, which has also played an indispensable role in guiding the operations of the smart farm in Jiangsu. Nationwide, the system transmits accurate navigation data to 2.2 million machinery units, and 200,000 drones carry out farming operations on the vast farmland across China.

The development of software applications has also contributed to the creation of new job opportunities, as China has certified the operation of 94 farming information bases and 31 state-level smart farming innovation centers.

The Chinese government is alert to the importance of building a strong, modern agricultural sector, in a bid to feed about 20 percent of the world's population with just nine percent of the globe's arable land. The country is working to convert all the permanent basic farmland into high-standard farmland with the support of advanced farming techniques, with the aim of ensuring it is capable of coping with extreme weather conditions and stabilizing and raising crop output in the long run.