Can AI technology really make agriculture no longer depend on the weather?

How Can Agriculture Reduce Its Dependence on Weather?

In recent months, the prices of vegetables have soared. What used to cost just a few coins for a bunch of vegetables now easily exceeds 10 yuan. Data shows that the average price of 28 key monitored vegetables has risen from more than 4 yuan per catty at the beginning of June to 6.43 yuan per catty at the end of September. The main reason behind this is the hot and rainy weather this summer, which has affected the yield.

Planting vegetables really depends on the weather. Bad weather may result in no harvest. Then, is there a way to make agriculture less affected, or even not affected by the weather?

Essentially, planting vegetables requires controlling various indicators such as light, temperature, humidity, etc. Since nature cannot be controlled, what if the vegetables are placed in a fully enclosed space and the environment is controlled by AI?

This year, the "2024 Guangming Duoduo Vertical Agriculture Challenge and the 4th Duoduo Agricultural Research and Technology Competition" jointly initiated by Pinduoduo and Guangming Group put forward the proposition of using modified containers for AI vegetable planting. It invited domestic and international participants from different disciplines to jointly challenge the use of high technology for vegetable planting.

01

How Does AI Plant Vegetables?

Specifically, participants will modify the containers used for cargo transportation, equipped with air conditioners, planting racks, light sources, various sensors, and AI algorithms, so as to intelligently regulate the growth conditions required by plants, such as temperature, light, moisture, air, and fertilizer.

For example, before a typhoon arrives, it is very muggy, and plants also need to breathe. The AI large model developed by one of the participating teams will send a cooling reminder after detecting weather changes, and the small model will give a corresponding prompt of "ventilate for 20 minutes" to intelligently dissipate heat for vegetables.

Another participating team has developed a "plant photosynthetic performance monitoring system", which can precisely control the amount of carbon dioxide used to predict the growth of vegetables. At the same time, with the help of an external cold source system, it can automatically cool the plants when the outdoor temperature is lower than the indoor temperature, as if realizing a dialogue with the plants using black technology.

In addition, some teams have developed a dedicated LED growth light source, which can adjust different spectra and light intensities according to the different growth stages of vegetables. "Cyber farmers" can complete a whole set of operations such as dimming, watering, fertilizing, and temperature control with just a few taps on the phone screen.

To achieve these "black technologies", the participating teams must have backgrounds in multiple disciplines, including optics, computer science, mechanical manufacturing, energy science, and more. It can be seen that agricultural development is no longer a single study of plants, but requires the joint efforts of many researchers to explore breakthroughs.

02

Container AI Vegetable Planting, the Future of Agriculture?

Returning to this container AI vegetable planting competition itself, perhaps you still have a question: Isn't Pinduoduo an e-commerce platform? Why did it initiate a vegetable planting competition?

On the one hand, Pinduoduo started from the retail of agricultural products. After growing and becoming stronger, it also wants to give back to agriculture. Through this challenge, the scientific and technological achievements in the laboratory are directly applied to the fields, breaking down the barriers between universities, research institutions, and enterprises, and can accelerate the industrial application of related technologies more quickly.

On the other hand, in the past, when it comes to planting vegetables, everyone thought it was a dirty and tiring job of "digging for food in the soil". But now, planting vegetables can also be bound with cutting-edge disciplines such as high-end AI and algorithms. Through this competition, Pinduoduo wants more young people to realize that agriculture can also be very cool and futuristic.

Since 2020, Pinduoduo has started to hold the "Duoduo Agricultural Research and Technology Competition". The venues of the first two competitions were set in the Yunnan Plateau Greenhouse, and in the recent two competitions, the competition venue has been upgraded to a container-type plant factory. Because container vegetable planting and AI technology vegetable planting are scenarios that integrate multiple technologies such as biology and information, and they are the development direction of future agriculture.

To put it to the extreme, how can we eat fresh vegetables in the Gobi Desert, ocean ferries, Antarctica, and space? Generally speaking, in the face of increasingly frequent extreme weather, how can agriculture no longer rely on the weather to ensure farmers' income and food security? Perhaps, the individual containers in this competition provide solutions.