A Bunch Of Young Farmers Hooked On Vegetable Growing in The Container

Chongming Island in Shanghai will be at the end of 2024. A cluster of lettuce is silently growing on a multi-layer planting frame in a completely enclosed container of forty cubic meters. LED lights strike the top of the lettuce, creating a layer of sci-fi luster.

Temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, and nutrient concentration of real-time display in the container on the screen, with the adjustment of these environmental variables, the growth rate of lettuce, size, color, and even taste have experienced minor variations.

The fourth Duo Agricultural Research and Technology Competition and the Bright Duo Duo Vertical Farming Challenge in 2024 revealed such a "cyberpunk" vegetable growing landscape. December 27, 2024, saw the official end of the competition. Following almost four months of preliminary rounds, six teams advanced to the finals featuring "academics" from universities and research labs and "industrialists" from businesses and startups.

This is not only a competition but also a trailblazing experiment for intelligent agriculture for the involved teams. Their "new farmland is the container".

 

 

Five elements-plant development, light, temperature, gas, water, and fertilizer-are vital.

Six teams have to develop the same range of lettuce in their containers in the finals. They noted the crop development under various conditions by carefully regulating the temperature, light, water, humidity, and fertilizer, so enabling constant program optimization.

The organizing committee ultimately assessed the winners according to plant factory design and construction, planting success, system stability and financial control, roadshow, and text summary. Unlike the past competition, this one has included fresh assessment materials including intelligent ring control and container hardware design, so extending the competition of agricultural production technology from mid-production to pre-production and exploring more aspects of competence greatly raises the challenge.

China Agricultural University Cyber Farmers won the laurel with comprehensive scores; they depend on accurate data analysis and intelligent regulation and control; production efficiency increased to 0.33 kg / square meter/day while the power consumption per kg of lettuce dropped to 12.25 kWh.

It should be noted that Mirai, the leader of the Japanese plant manufacturer, has a current value of 0.3-0.45 kg/m2/day. Stated differently, Cyber Farmer's statistics reflect the industry-leading level.

"If this program is implemented in major plant factories, the cost of electricity per kilogram of lettuce can be lowered to within 10 kWh of the industry leader." Yang Hao, the captain of Cyber Farmers, believes that the team name "Cyber Farmers" really reflects their philosophy-that of letting the Internet and artificial intelligence energize agriculture and serve as the new farmers of the modern day.

Specializing in Agricultural Bio-environmental and Energy Engineering, which is a cross-discipline between industry and agriculture, our team is housed under the Key Laboratory of Facility Agriculture Engineering of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China Agricultural University. Plant Physiology and Environment Research Laboratory Yang Hao began.

Though the energy consumption of air conditioning has dropped by about 70%, the Cyber Farmers team has been successful in raising the cultivated area by more than two times and boosting the yield by almost six times compared with the past event. Yang Hao feels that this is a result of the team's varied disciplinary background; "It is not entirely people who study agriculture or entirely people who study engineering will do this thing well, to do it well everyone must work together, and it is necessary to have the knowledge of agronomy, combined with the foundation of engineering."

"That's what we do; soccer players absolutely must attend soccer matches; table tennis players absolutely must attend table tennis matches." Designed a set of high-yielding, low-consumption plant factory programs, through the creative design of hanging moveable cultivation frame, so that the cultivation frame according to the crop growth needs to be contracted or expanded, and successfully raised the space utilization rate of the container to 2.34. Miao Chen is the team leader of the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and this time their team from the perspective of scale production to dilute the marginal cost perspective.

After 50 days of meticulous cultivation, the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences team finally realized 1680 plants, a total weight of 299.55 kg of "bumper harvest" in which the rate of A-grade commodities to meet the standard of more than 90% of the total output of a crop of lettuce ranked first.

One quite significant cross-cutting field is plant manufacturing. Agriculture is not only about plant factories; smart agriculture is a very broad field requiring talents with many specialised knowledge backgrounds; execute smart control demands talents in studying computers and automatic control. We require mechanical experts when we wish to build greenhouse structures, plant factory building, farming systems, Dimming, control fertiliser and water, etc., which could call for abilities in the agriculture sector and soil and water engineers. Only when these disciplines are combined will smart agriculture be possible.

In this sense, do software and IT agricultural 'layman' progressively expand into the vertical agricultural sector of upcoming farmers? On this island, they investigate ways to maximize cut costs and energy usage, and increase yield, so enabling farmers to "no more look at the sky to eat."

 

 

"Doing plant factories is the ultimate form of agriculture, a real we independent of the process of food production, not only about the problem of food, but also can not go further to do customized nutrition, personalized food." According to the involved team members, vertical farming-which is symbolized by plant factories-is a blue ocean. The speed of discovery now flows from the experimental field into the market.

Focused in agricultural plant factories and hydroponics, Shandong owns an agricultural enterprise known as "Leaf Man Technology". This time, they cultivated a single plant weighing 460 grams "Vegetable King," and came first with the "highest single plant weight award." Regarding experience, they are non-agricultural scientific courses; nevertheless, the planting of this matter to uphold a very high degree of reverence, hoping to have better sensitivity in the regulation of indicators, thus reducing the plant's stress reaction, so enabling a more comfortable growth.

"We take care of the crop as if it were a human being, thus we try to find ways to make it more comfortable, but it is still unexpected to grow this big. This is the first time we have grown lettuce this big in a plant factory." Their comments were.

The large container structure design-as little as pulley components-is a cohesive team member of creativity. Europe and the United States plant design concepts and the domestic popular Japanese school is very different; they will study in Canada, entrepreneurship during the accumulation of ideas, creativity to bring to the competition, and plant plant plant teams around the country to exchange, but also is considered as a brick to attract jade.

 

 

For a long time, the temperature, geography, soil, and other natural circumstances of the restrictions, thereby allowing agriculture to not be able to eliminate the fate of "eating by the skies". The evolution of intelligent agriculture and the transformation in agricultural technology offer fresh hope.

Top priorities include China's huge population, plant factories, yield, quality, safety, and energy consumption; the four dimensions can lead to breakthroughs, and modern agriculture can be a sustainable and healthy development.

The evolution of agriculture cannot be accomplished by one discipline, sector, or person; it requires complete cooperation with the flow of elements from all spheres of production, education, research, and business.

From the competition this year, the players independently designed and built container plant factories, planting competition, the final six teams have their own AI technology features, in the lettuce growth environment optimization, intelligent control system development and other aspects have achieved different results.

Plant factory environment optimization technology and control methods, nutrient solution formula dynamic adjustment technology, etc., have been written into a paper or entered the patent examination and acceptance stage up to now; teams in the process of the competition found the "technology productization" opportunities.

For instance, the Cyber Farmer team's DLI-based mobile light replenishment system has been implemented at the Xiaotangshan Modern Agricultural Science and Technology Demonstration Park in Beijing, where the strawberries are flourishing nicely. Successfully pushed both domestically and internationally, the novel farming technology developed by the Leafy Vegetable Man team around vertical farms has also generated sets of independent intellectual property rights for the Leafy Green production equipment system.

Perhaps China's intelligent farming of the future resides behind a piece of green lettuce in the plant factory.