Yunhe Establishes Zhejiang's First Batch of Digital Agricultural Factories

Recently, the digital plant factory for fruits and vegetables, created by Yunhe, has been recognized as one of Zhejiang’s first batch of digital agricultural factories. This recognition was organized by the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in accordance with the province’s digital reform, digital rural construction, and the “Dual Strength” agricultural action plan. The initiative aims to enhance the application of digital technology in rural industries, stimulate digital vitality in agriculture, accelerate the development of new agricultural organizational models, and build a modern agricultural industrial system to empower high-quality agricultural development and rural modernization.

The Shihe Organic Farm, located in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, covers 11.5 square kilometers. It is built on the foundation of a pristine ecological environment and introduces new varieties and technologies from Taiwan to cultivate organic vegetables and green fruits with precision, providing consumers with safe and healthy premium agricultural products. Over more than a decade of organic farming, Shihe has accumulated extensive experience in cultivation. Committed to organic principles, the farm has set its sights on digital agricultural reform. It aims to digitize its production processes, converting long-accumulated tacit knowledge into explicit standards to achieve standardized organic farming. By upgrading production facilities with intelligent technologies, it seeks to enable automation and address labor shortages. Furthermore, it establishes full traceability from seedling cultivation, agricultural inputs, and production to product distribution and sales.

As an agricultural technology company specializing in digital solutions for agricultural enterprises, Yunhe deeply understands Shihe Organic Farm’s urgent needs in its digital transformation. The two parties have collaborated to create the Shihe Digital Plant Factory for fruits and vegetables.

Seeds are fundamental to the quality and yield of agricultural products. During the process of cultivating new varieties, Shihe continuously introduces high-quality germplasm resources from home and abroad. In 2021, Shihe Organic Farm established a standardized seed source drying and classification storage room to categorize and preserve seeds. Yunhe assisted in creating a digital archive system to digitize germplasm resources, ensuring the safety and controllability of essential seed varieties.

To address challenges such as the labor-intensive nature of seedling transportation, the complexity of daily management tasks, and the physical strain on workers, Yunhe customized an unmanned seedling bed transport system for Shihe’s seedling workshop. The system consists of a master control computer, an upper feeding robot, and a lower feeding robot. It successfully separates agricultural operations from plant growth spaces. Workers no longer need to traverse planting zones but instead wait for robots to transport seedlings to the operation area for agricultural tasks, and then back to the planting area. This not only significantly reduces the physical workload of workers but also minimizes external pest infestations in the planting zones.

Shihe Organic Farm operates over 300 greenhouses. Routine tasks such as patrolling, irrigation, and fertilization were labor-intensive and inefficient, often leading to wasted water and electricity resources due to rudimentary management practices. By establishing an IoT system and an intelligent irrigation and fertilization system, the farm achieved real-time monitoring of greenhouse environments, anomaly alerts, and automated operations for shading, ventilation, cooling, and water-fertilizer irrigation. These measures ensure optimal living conditions for the crops. Preliminary statistics indicate that the digital transformation has achieved water savings of 30-50%, fertilizer savings of 35-40%, and labor savings of 50% per acre.

Overall, the digital upgrade of Shihe Organic Farm has achieved improvements in three key areas:

1. Standardized Cultivation
Previously, cultivation relied heavily on workers’ experience, leading to inconsistent planting methods and disorganized management. Communication between field workers and farm managers was inefficient. Now, farm owners, managers, and production staff share a unified production system, enabling standardized digital operations for processes from seedling selection and transplantation to irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting. This ensures consistency in product quality within and across batches.

2. Labor Savings
Agricultural production workers are aging, and the physically demanding nature of traditional farming practices has made it difficult to attract younger individuals to frontline agricultural roles. Through the upgrade of smart agricultural facilities, the burden of agricultural labor has been significantly reduced, attracting more young people to join the agricultural sector.

3. Resource Conservation and Efficiency Enhancement
The integration of standardized cultivation methods with IoT and artificial intelligence enables intelligent operations for irrigation, fertilization, ventilation, and cooling. By leveraging data analysis from the smart agriculture system, preventative measures can be implemented, conserving labor, water, fertilizer, and electricity resources. Additionally, the full traceability of products from seeds to agricultural goods enhances the competitiveness of organic brands and improves production efficiency.