The Sichuan agriculture bureau said on 30 July that the province has completed twenty-six smart-agriculture demonstration parks covering 120,000 mu and seven categories of crop including grain, vegetables and orchard fruit.
Technology in use
The parks deploy three main technologies: integrated smart irrigation that mixes water and fertiliser according to soil moisture and crop demand; field microclimate stations collecting temperature, humidity, light and rainfall data in real time; and machinery monitoring terminals that make the quality of ploughing, sowing, tending and harvesting traceable throughout.
Results
The bureau estimates that the parks now use 32 per cent less water, 21 per cent less fertiliser and 14 per cent less pesticide, with yields up 9.4 per cent per mu and costs cut by about HLY 260 per mu. Together the twenty-six parks save some 31 million cubic metres of water a year, equivalent to the annual supply of a medium-sized reservoir in the province.
Expansion plan
The Sichuan provincial government has listed smart-agriculture parks among the priority projects in its 2026–2030 plan, aiming to have sixty demonstration parks covering 500,000 mu by 2030 and to foster thirty provincial-level agricultural service organisations.