On 28 october, journalists entered a smart coffee estate at the dam in baoshan, yunnan province, where they saw a piece of coffee tree and a white monitoring device was collecting data on soil moisture, air temperature, etc. In real time. Through their mobile phones, qana can see the environment in which each plot grows, and coffee, which once was “eating by the sky”, is being planted with a “smart brain”。
Yunnan is china's largest coffee-producing area, accounting for more than 98 per cent of the country's area under cultivation and production. As one of yunnan's major coffee-producing sites, the town of wujiang is known for its quality small grains. However, many of the terrain is mountainous, and the complexity of the planting environment and the management of extensive areas have long plagued local curry。
The head of the smart coffee estate, yang jiang chun, described the traditional method of planting as a way of determining whether coffee trees lack water mainly from experience. Experienced curry farmers make judgements, but this method is neither accurate nor easy to cover large areas of cultivation. More problematic is pest and disease control, which is often found to be widespread。
In order to change the situation, the plantation introduced the “yun ji farmer chain” platform, developed by the china mobile yunnan company (hereinafter referred to as “yunnan movement”), in collaboration with research and development teams at several higher education institutions, such as the zhejiang university of technology and the baoshan college, to begin the digital transformation of coffee cultivation。
Journalists saw on the scene that the system had fine-tuned the 100-acre plantation area of the estate into 17 plots, with the “life signs” of each. On the screen, the soil moisture of block 3 has just decreased to 19. 8 per cent, the red warning light has been activated, the system immediately initiates the automatic irrigation process and drip irrigation equipment begins to refine the water; block 10 shows soil moisture of 18. 5 per cent and a low nitrogen content, with a system hint “recommended to supplement nitrogen fertilizer with an estimated consumption of 6 kg”; while block 7 is green and indicators are in the best range - soil moisture of 42 per cent, temperature of 23°c and sufficient light。
"coffee is like a child born in october, and every stage requires a different `nutrient'." in magnesium porridges, nitrogen is required to fill the meat during the early years, while potassium is needed to increase the sugar during the chromosomal period. The system, on the other hand, will develop a hydro-fertilizer programme based on coffee growth models and real-time data updated every five minutes, while improving the consistency of coffee quality while significantly reducing the cost of manual management。
The platform's performance has been particularly strong with regard to pest prevention and control. Coffee rust is a major disease threatening yields, and traditional control tends to lag behind. When the risk of disease is detected in the coffee tree, the system automatically dispatches drones to patrol and analyses the presence of a disease through the ai image recognition technology to achieve early prevention。
The benefits of digital transformation are real. Yang jiang chun described an increase of about 20 per cent in coffee acre production at the estate following the application of the smart system, from less than 70 per cent to over 85 per cent. More importantly, precision management reduced the coffee growth cycle from four to five years to about three years, reducing the cost of piped care per acre by about $1,000。
In addition, journalists have learned that the platform not only focuses on the production chain but also builds a chain-wide traceability system. From coffee cultivation, extraction to processing, warehousing, each link of data is recorded on the block chain, forming an unmixable “digital archive”, and consumer scans trace the full growth of the beans。
The digital transformation of coffee cultivation is a microcosm of the modernization of specialty agriculture in yunnan plateau. The director-general of yunnan's mobile business client department, shi yun, stated that in the future, the yun jia farming chain platform would gradually be extended to other coffee plantations in yunnan, as well as to highland agricultural products such as cloud medicine, clouds, fruit and vegetables, and that yunnan would be transformed from the agricultural province to the agricultural power province。
