Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

NetEase, Ali, JD.com, Tencent. What is the future development path of AI agriculture, which the major Internet giants have competed for?

"Mobile phones have become new agricultural tools, data have become new agricultural materials, and live streaming has become new agricultural work." Due to the influence of the epidemic, live broadcast selling has become one of the effective ways to solve the problem of unsalable agricultural goods.

According to the Ministry of Commerce, the online sales of agricultural products nationwide reached 93.68 billion yuan in the first quarter, an increase of 31.0 percent, with more than 4 million live e-commerce shows. Some people sigh that this is something I dared not even think about before.

In fact, there has already been a great relationship between the Internet and agriculture. In the past, NetEase raised pigs and then Tencent raised geese. In the middle, Ali raises cattle and JD.com raises chickens. Although Tencent later said that raising geese was just an April Fool's Day joke, it turned around and really planted cucumbers, and the Internet giants enjoyed "pastoral life".

Behind the pastoral life of the Internet giants is a battle about AI agriculture.

The necessity of AI Agriculture

As the basic industry of the national economy, agriculture affects the daily life of the public. In today's era of rapid development of the Internet, agricultural production is also facing certain problems.

First, the labor force is increasingly flocking to cities and towns, and a large area of land is abandoned in rural areas.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the number of rural working-age workers in 2019 is 331 million, accounting for 56.8% of the rural resident population, which is much lower than the national average and much lower than the urban average of 79.5%. The number of young and middle-aged people going to cities and towns from rural areas is much higher than the return flow.

The increasing scarcity of rural labor force has led to the intensification of the abandonment of rural cultivated land. As of 2017, 1.324 million natural villages have disappeared in China. Food is the most important thing for the people, and ensuring food security has become an inevitable problem.

Second, with the population growth, the demand for food is also higher, but the world is also facing a shortage of land resources, limited arable land needs to produce more, which requires the intervention of technologies such as AI. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the world's population will exceed 9 billion in 2025, compared with the current 25 per cent population growth, the demand for food will reach 70 per cent.

Robot technology, UAV, automatic agricultural vehicle and so on in AI technology will effectively improve farming efficiency and liberate the labor force to a certain extent. There are opportunities to develop the capabilities of AI technology from breeding analysis, field monitoring, precision spraying, and the final harvest stage.

Third, agriculture can be said to be one of the few blue seas in the Internet era. In the report on in-depth Research and Investment Prospect of China's Smart Agriculture from 2016 to 2020, CIC consultants pointed out that the size of the application-based smart agriculture market will reach US $9.02 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach US $18.45 billion by 2022.

Internet giants are bound to share a piece of the cake. At the same time, the resources and technical support brought into AI agriculture by the giants will also promote the application of AI agricultural technology and the growth of market scale more quickly. In the field of AI agriculture, the invisible smoke has already spread.

The agricultural territory of AI must be disputed.

In recent years, Internet giants, whether Ali, JD.com, Tencent and Baidu, have launched a bugle for AI agriculture. with their own advantages, Internet giants have played their own roles in the field of AI agriculture.

Ali: in September 2019, Ali launched the AI beekeeping system at the Yunqi Conference, which is expected to increase the production of 300000 domestic bee farmers by 20% in the future. then, in December of the same year, Aliyun combined with Jingwei Technology released remote sensing AI agriculture, which can be applied to large-scale asset inventory, yield and land change monitoring, and further promote the landing of intelligent agriculture. JD.com: on March 19, 2020, JD.com announced the establishment of an industrial AI center. Industrial AI is based on robot learning, computer vision, knowledge graph and other cutting-edge AI technology, and will be used in industry, agriculture, finance and other fields. Tencent: in May 2019, Tencent AI Lab and the Institute of Information of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences established a joint laboratory for intelligent agriculture, which will promote the further integration of agriculture with AI, IoT, big data and other fields. Baidu: at the Create2019 Baidu AI developer conference, Baidu brain launched a cooperation with BOE Plant Factory to propose an intelligent soilless cultivation solution for AI Plant Factory. In recent years, Baidu has also launched solutions on intelligent agriculture with its own advantages of AI and big data through cooperation with agricultural giants such as McFei Agriculture and Leiwo heavy Industry.

The reason why the major Internet giants joined AI agriculture is not only because agriculture is the remaining blue ocean in the Internet era, but also because AI agriculture is an important part of building the ecological map of the Internet.

Ali and JD.com control the cost and quality of goods from the source by intervening in AI agriculture, and launch competitive products by taking advantage of big brands. For Ali's box horse, Tmall supermarket, JD.com 's 7fresh, JD.com supermarket can be said to be a very important layout.

And by starting with AI agriculture, which is the basis of digital city, we can connect other areas of people's livelihood and form a joint vertical and horizontal. Add weight for the Internet giants to further snatch the digital city.

While Ali and Beidahuang worked together, they obtained digital Longjiang orders; JD.com Chengdu Research Institute of Digital Agriculture won a seat in the construction of big data Center for Digital Agriculture in Chengdu by joining other agricultural giants and academies of sciences; Tencent cooperated with New Hope Group to establish New Tencent, which also joined Tencent Cloud to dock with big data Center in Sichuan Province.

From the above point of view, AI agriculture can be said to be a battleground for Internet giants, but in the field of AI agriculture, it is not a day's work to get a return.

The road of AI agriculture is doomed to be rough and long.

Although there are many stories to tell in AI agriculture, it is not easy to tell the story of AI agriculture.

First of all, it is the technical problems that AI agriculture needs to face. AI agriculture needs to be carried out on the basis of obtaining a large amount of data. There are many kinds of crops and different living conditions and habits, which means that data collection cannot be done once and for all. At the same time, crop growth cycle and seasonal changes determine that data collection is a project that requires long-term investment of huge resources.

Secondly, small farmers account for more than 80% of the domestic agricultural market, with small-scale, decentralized and other characteristics. If these decisions want to promote AI agriculture, they will face the problem of huge cost and long cycle of investment transformation. Because only by entering the standardization of similar industries, it is possible to use large-scale machinery and equipment, production technology and management means, so as to realize the industrialization of AI agriculture.

There is also the social attribute of acquaintances in rural areas, which also affects the Internet giants' access to all aspects of AI agriculture. Unlike other Internet industries, agriculture is highly dependent on offline services, which requires different promotion plans for different regions.

At the same time, if we want to promote the development of AI agriculture, we need a large number of technical personnel who understand agriculture and AI. But at present, the domestic AI technical personnel are not very sufficient, not to mention the shortage of AI agricultural talents.

In short, AI agriculture has not been fully promoted yet, which is both a benefit and a problem for Internet giants to eat crabs. The acquisition of AI agriculture is of great significance for Internet giants to build their own ecology, but the development of AI agriculture can not be achieved overnight. Internet giants still have a long way to go in rural life in AI agriculture.

# columnist #

Liu Kuang, Wechat official account: liukuang110, everyone is a product manager columnist, chairman of Hainan Sanche Network Technology Co., Ltd., founder of Buyuanbang Information, well-known self-media. China is the first to use the combination of Zen and Taoism to understand the Internet, and to combine Chinese traditional culture with the Internet, so as to form a real Internet culture with Chinese characteristics and the spirit of innovation.

Http://www.woshipm.com/ai/3858635.html

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.