Initiatives to boost digital agriculture

The Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region is working to improve its rural infrastructure, optimize its service system and promote digitalization in agriculture, local officials said.

Xu Jin, deputy director of the Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, said the overall level of the digital agriculture and rural development in Guangxi is 37.9 percent, ranking among the top 10 regions in the country.

Agricultural and rural information expansion drives the rapid development of e-commerce for agricultural products such as Beiliu's passion fruit, Wuming district's mango, Rong'an's kumquat and Liuzhou snail noodles.

Guangxi's agricultural digitalization level has ranked fifth in the country, according to the 2020 China Digital Economy Development Index released by the China Electronics Information Industry Development Research Institute.

Guangxi is providing full coverage of information access to villages and households in rural areas, and built 43,800 information stations to benefit farmers and the local economy.

"In 2018, we sought to invest 50 million yuan ($7.8 million) to build more than 8,000 stations. By 2021, the autonomous region will invest a total of 146.7 million yuan to complete the task.

"We will also construct professional stations in the farmers' cooperatives to meet the needs of information and e-commerce services as well as simple agricultural information stations for farmers' batch market operators and shops," Xu said.

"We will also open up direct sales channels for village-level stations and wholesale markets."

Guangxi has provided resources to help the integration of characteristic industries and the digital economy.

The region has built special zones to ensure information access to villages and households while promoting the industrial development of digital projects, rural stations and agricultural services.

Since 2020, a total of 31 million yuan has been invested in 14 zones with projects in characteristic industries and digital agriculture.

New business entities such as agricultural enterprises, as well as a production area market and a digital production area warehouse of agricultural products, are fully integrated to serve industrial production, processing, warehousing, sales, branding, and promote the formation of a complete industrial chain.

After the implementation of the projects, the brand influence of characteristic agricultural products in the project counties will be greatly enhanced.

The region has created a batch of industry-wide digital agriculture projects.

"We insist on cultivating new kinetic energy with informatization, and integrating digitization into all elements of agriculture, the chain, the industry, and the entire region," Xu said.

Guangxi is home to 465 smart agricultural parks and 30 various big data cloud platforms. It has implemented 65 smart planting and breeding scale projects across the industry chain, and selected 57 autonomous region-level key demonstration projects for the deep integration of big data and agriculture.

Guangxi's local digital agricultural enterprises are accelerating their growth and their benchmarking role is significant.

Ming Ming GuoYuan Group in Guangxi developed the country's first digital map of fruit trees around the planting of kumquat, and promoted corporate brands to enter the top 50 Chinese fruit brands.