Unmanned Farms Unlock ‘Smart Farms’

Zhu Junke is the owner of the ecological unmanned farm of Hefeng Seed Industry in Zibo, Shandong. The technical creators of his 500 acre ecological unmanned farm come from a team led by Lan Yubin, an academician of the European Academy of Sciences, a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and a professor at Shandong University of Technology. Lan Yubin told reporters, “We have spent 6 years building a smart farm labeled as’ ecological and unmanned ‘, solving the problem of’ who will plant the land and how to plant it well ‘.

Recently, the reporter noticed on site that the farmer sends different signals at the command center, and the agricultural machinery will automatically prepare the land, sow, fertilize, apply medicine, and harvest according to the instructions. Lan Yubin calculated an account for the reporter: whether it’s wheat or corn, the entire process of intelligent cultivation, mid-term management, and later harvest can reduce labor costs by 25%, save water by 20%, and reduce pesticides by 30%.
Unmanned agricultural machinery uses the ‘Beidou GPS system+attitude sensors’ to obtain high-precision positioning information in real-time, and uses a 4G/5G network to send it to the cloud platform. Combined with geographic information systems, operators can accurately control agricultural machinery in the office, making it possible for one person to manage thousands of acres of land. “Zhang Yanfei introduced that satellite remote sensing monitoring After the agricultural information collected by drone remote sensing monitoring and ground monitoring is uploaded to the cloud platform, it will be stored, summarized, and analyzed. Combined with backend agricultural management data, yield data, plant growth data, etc., it will form the agricultural production big data of an ecological unmanned farm. This can scientifically guide agricultural production, determine when to sow and fertilize, and more accurately irrigate, fertilize, and use drugs to improve the yield and quality of agricultural products, and establish a data-driven “digital farm”.

Ecological unmanned farms integrate many high-tech technologies such as biological prevention and control, green plant protection, drones, agricultural robots, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, etc. Lan Yubin believes that this is a necessary step for rural revitalization, and competition in this field has just begun.