Sustainable agricultural production is a global priority, and the introduction of highly intelligent agriculture solutions can ensure more efficient use of resources, improved cultivation and livestock rearing by giving farms access to a raft of valuable information and data around the clock.
Smart agriculture integrates multiple technologies, including cloud computing, 5G networks, IoT, remote sensing and high-precision positioning to provide accurate perception, visible management and smart decisions for agricultural production.
Precise cultivation
With changing climate and unpredictable weather patterns, farmers need precise information to manage all aspects of growing, harvesting and selling their crops. The application of China Mobile 5G + IoT technologies for crops in fields and industrialized agriculture allows various environmental data to be collected regularly, so real time smart environmental control can ensure crops have an optimal growing environment.
Smart environment control collates data on the environment and crop growth conditions such as air temperature and humidity, light, carbon dioxide concentration, hydroponic solution concentration and pH value through sensors and HD cameras. Farm managers can instantly compare data collected in their fields with crop growth models and control the growing environment precisely.
This data enables farmers to make smart decisions by using precise water and fertilizer integration technology to identify the optimal amounts needed for crops at various times in different conditions. The farms achieve energy saving, consumption reduction and environmental protection goals while increasing productivity and income.
Through integrated smart agriculture solutions, farms gain an end-to-end solutions that provide data from precise cultivation to processing traceability and agricultural product sales.
The technology is also developing a rich ecosystem of shared knowledge that helps establish cooperative relations with leading enterprises in professional agricultural hardware endpoint equipment, software applications, operation services, and planting agricultural technology, and provide services for multiple detailed scenarios.
Large-scale farming in Sichuan: A tea farm in Sichuan has expanded its use of technology to include drones as part of its farm management for precision planting. The digitization of production and upgrade in management included building a unified data center that integrates local industry data, and achieves unified management and sharing of data resources.
Also in Sichuan, at the Provincial Modern Agricultural Industrial Park in Linshui, China Mobile has developed a visualization system for them to monitor the weather, soil moisture, personnel behavior, etc. in real time. An automatic drip irrigation system using big data helped achieve precise cultivation.
Precise livestock farming
Large-scale livestock farming needs to collect and analyze data from animals as well as environmental data. China Mobile has increased the level of farming informatization to achieve intelligent management of livestock farming processes, which helps the farm reduce rearing costs and improve management efficiency.
5G can be used for monitoring the environment where the livestock live, their feeding frequency, and issue early warnings of abnormal activity. Also, using an intelligent livestock rearing management platform, data from farm production is collected to meet informatization needs, enable remote visualized management, and provide farming enterprises with information-based tools for efficient management. With China Mobile technologies, like facial access control and vehicle GPRS, all people and vehicles at the farm are monitored for betterbiosecurity to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
Informationization of a pig farm in Sichuan: For example, China Mobile 5G solution is used to drive digital transformation of a pig farm in Sichuan. Previous 4G and Wi-Fi networks could not support the video surveillance system to provide reliable and stable real-time monitoring to the farm. China Mobile provided a 5G solution for the pig farm to manage livestock through real-time monitoring, remote control, biometric identification and other technologies to ensure the pigs stay healthy.
Intelligent agricultural machinery
Using advanced technologies such as a 5G network, edge computing and autonomous driving, intelligent agricultural machinery can automatically navigate from depot to farm and avoid obstacles or pedestrians. Path planning, high-precision navigation and video improves visibility of the whole farm environment through real-time monitoring with unmanned agricultural machines.
China Mobile’s intelligent agricultural machinery management system integrates its 5G network and satellite positioning technology and realizes intelligent supervision of agricultural machinery operations. It provides an overview of the location of agricultural machinery and quickly reviews the machines’ status and sends fault alerts if it detects anything unusual. Using satellite positioning it can plan the route of agricultural machinery, preset the operating radius or range, and realize scientific scheduling of agricultural machinery.
All agricultural machinery operations are monitored thoroughly with multi-channel video. The 5G communication link allows high-speed video return. Videos and images of the operation process are recorded to allow remote inspections and quality control.
The combination of intelligent terminals and AI technology realizes intelligent management such as scientific scheduling of agricultural machinery, operation monitoring and data supervision, saving labor costs and improving the efficiency of automatic calculation of operation data.
Beidahuang Group Unmanned Farm Project in Jiansanjiang, Heilongjiang: Unmanned agricultural machinery was introduced to improve the overall farming, cultivation, management, and harvesting of crops. The autonomous driving of agricultural machinery has strict requirements for end-to-end delay, so the demand for low network delay is obvious.
The platform presets operation paths, pre-plans operation tasks, and the agricultural machinery automatically drives out of the hangar to complete operations automatically. When obstacles are encountered in the road or field, the machinery will automatically decelerate and avoid, and automatically detour when the turning radius is met. The agricultural machinery can also collect additional useful environmental data automatically while driving around the fields.
