Yu Yang, CEO of Farmland Manager: Farmland services are delivered at one stop, and small farms also need great wisdom

[51CTO.com original article] If you see a drone flying slowly above a rice field, don't think it's a player playing for fun. In fact, it's very likely that a farmer is using a drone to spray pesticides. In a field in a rural area of ​​Hebei, less than two meters above the ground, a drone carrying ten kilograms of pesticides flew at a constant speed along the rice field. The pesticide turned into a white mist and evenly floated on the rice field. Local farmers told reporters, "It was very difficult to spray pesticides in the past. We could only spray 10 acres of land a day. From time to time, people inhaled pesticide spray and were poisoned and sent to the hospital. Now, with the use of drones to spray pesticides, we can spray 5 acres of land in five minutes. It saves money, labor and is safe."

So how did drones enter the farming life of farmers? There is one company that cannot be ignored, and that is Farmland Manager. Farmland Manager aims to be the largest Internet agricultural service platform in the country, and its vision is to allow farmers to obtain a variety of services in the entire agricultural production process through an entrance on their mobile phones without leaving their homes. Unlike the APP that everyone usually thinks of, Farmland Manager promotes a set of SaaS software through rural retail stores, and then the retail stores can use SaaS services to bring all of their user information and business activities online. For example, it can help farmers book drones, harvesters and other services. On the other end of the software are various agricultural service organizations and individuals who provide services by taking orders.

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A 51CTO reporter recently interviewed Yu Yang, CEO of Nongtian Guanjia, and asked him to share his experience and insights on how Nongtian Guanjia entered the agricultural market and helped farmers enjoy more information services.

What do drones bring to farmers?

Yu Yang believes that in the industrial application market, China's drones are in a leading position worldwide. This sentence actually has two meanings. One is that the technology level is leading. The second is that the application growth rate is very fast. It has begun to be widely used in surveying and mapping, electricity, agriculture, military and police and other industries. The third is that the market has a large growth space and many opportunities.

So what problems can drones solve in the agricultural industry? Yu Yang gave his own three criteria: First, the problem that drones solve must be the pain point of industry users and a real necessity; second, the use of drones in industry application scenarios must be relatively high-frequency and able to accumulate data; finally, regarding the use of drones, decisions should preferably be fully market-oriented, allowing users to use them through their own choices rather than through bidding.

The reporter learned that the application of drones in agriculture can be divided into short-term and long-term aspects. In the short term, drones are a tool to improve efficiency. Drones can cover 300 to 400 acres of land a day, which is 30 times more efficient than human labor. Moreover, the spraying is even, which also avoids the risk of drug poisoning. In the long term, drones can be equipped with a variety of sensors to collect data on crop growth, pest and disease forecasts, and soil moisture conditions. They can be regarded as flying data collectors.

Of course, in the entire application process, there are also several links that need to be further optimized. Yu Yang told reporters that, for example, the battery life may require drone equipment manufacturers to develop new energy fuels. In addition to the hardware needs to be improved, there is also a very important part of the content is the service problem, such as how to standardize the service, how to promote it on a large scale, how to quantify the experience through evaluation, and how to use big data to combine the climate, soil, pests and diseases to make some prediction plans and provide services such as smart medication and pest prevention.

Unlock the secrets of the farm steward

In May this year, wheat stripe rust disease and pests broke out in Shandong Province. Farmland Manager predicted the disaster in advance through the system background, communicated and cooperated with the Shandong Provincial Plant Protection Department in advance, and did a lot of preparatory work. When the real disease and pests broke out, everything was ready, and emergency plans and disaster relief preparations were quickly implemented. Hundreds of drones were deployed overnight to quickly curb the spread of the disease and pest disaster.

A pesticide retail store in Henan Province used the SAAS system and provided a very popular service for spraying pesticides by drone. It completed last year's full-year sales in just one month.

The above two are just two of the many application cases of Farmland Manager, but these two cases vividly demonstrate the value of Farmland Manager. Through this SAAS system, retail stores can get help in three aspects: first, the entire business activities are more refined; second, they can enjoy more agricultural equipment services while reducing capital investment; third, the upstream supply chain is integrated, allowing retail stores to get more resources at a cheaper price, such as pesticides and fertilizers, and the SAAS system can provide retail stores with a package of solutions, such as purchase suggestions, drug use plans, etc., and provide users with more targeted guidance and help.

Yu Yang said that the service architecture of the farm steward is actually very complex. First of all, the service covers a large area, and the dispatch radius is often hundreds of kilometers. Secondly, there are many influencing factors to match the needs of both supply and demand, such as weather, price, and geographical distribution of crops. The ideal path is to first collect the basic information of farmers and establish personal special files. Then the farm steward will make an estimation model based on the surrounding geographical conditions, weather conditions, and pest damage, and push targeted information to farmers. Once the farmer places an order, the system will match the nearest service team according to the farmer's file, and the service team will take the initiative to contact the farmer, and the two parties will evaluate each other afterwards. Since the service is fully digital, a lot of land information can be fed back to farmers afterwards, such as the actual area of ​​the land, the spraying efficiency, and the prevention and control effect.

Yu Yang pointed out that although SAAS software is free, it is not directly provided to farmers. The main target audience is agricultural supply retail stores in rural areas or towns. The entry point is to help the agricultural supply store owners improve their management level through SAAS software, such as pushing some promotional information or small knowledge of pest and disease forecasts to farmers. In addition, mastering the information of farmers can help retailers make more accurate decisions on the purchase and allocation of medicines, which is more targeted.

Big data for small farms

Yu Yang admitted that artificial intelligence cannot solve the problems of farm housekeepers at this stage, but it can help farm housekeepers upgrade their services in the future. First, artificial intelligence can be used to predict pests and diseases and recommend drug use plans. Second, machine vision or image recognition can be used to achieve remote diagnosis and treatment, allowing experts to intuitively diagnose and treat through aerial photography, so that farmers can solve agricultural problems without leaving home. Of course, the basis for achieving all this in the future is to do a good job of data collection in the early stage, collect a large amount of basic data, and establish models, so that it is possible to use artificial intelligence to achieve more applications in the later stage. "When spraying, there are also many places where edge computing is needed, such as the spraying area, the spraying effect, and the flight drug use plan, which can be quantitatively evaluated through calculations." Yu Yang concluded.

So far, more than 3,000 aerial defense organizations have joined the Farmland Manager platform, which can dispatch nearly 10,000 drones. Branches have been established in Heilongjiang, Hubei, Hunan, Shandong, Jiangsu, Henan, Hebei, Anhui, Jiangxi and other places. The aerial defense service covers nearly 100 cities in more than 10 provinces, and the total operating area exceeded 8 million mu in 2017. Regarding future plans, Yu Yang said that in the future, the breadth of business will be expanded, diversified services will be provided, and more needs of industry customers will be covered.

When talking about the help that Microsoft Accelerator has provided to Farmland Manager, Yu Yang said that first of all, Microsoft is a big brand, and Microsoft Accelerator has helped Farmland Manager greatly enhance its brand influence, and has also provided good training and improvement for the team and the company's strength; secondly, Microsoft has a large number of customer resources, and Farmland Management hopes to use Microsoft to integrate relevant social resources; finally, Microsoft's leading technology can provide a lot of help to Farmland Manager in big data analysis, and Farmland Manager will also learn and improve based on some applications provided by Microsoft.

At this year's Double Entrepreneurship Week, Microsoft Accelerator recommended Nongtian Guanjia to participate in the exhibition. CEO Yu Yang was received by the Vice Premier of the State Council and shook hands with the Premier. He introduced the project to him and received positive reviews. Microsoft Accelerator recommended Nongtian Guanjia to participate in the "Double Entrepreneurship Week Innovation Pioneer Top 20", and Nongtian Guanjia successfully made the list!

In terms of technology, Azure mainly supports Farmland Manager from three aspects:

First, infrastructure support is provided through virtual machine services. Farmland Manager uses customized virtual servers to quickly deploy the backend of the pilot APK. IT personnel only need to upload the locally configured operating system image to the Azure public cloud service platform to achieve deployment and operation. Secondly, the cloud storage service realizes data disaster recovery in different locations. Azure's cloud storage service supports synchronization and disaster recovery of different data centers, builds a reliable off-site disaster recovery solution in the cloud, realizes redundant storage of data, and ensures data availability. Thirdly, the cloud storage service realizes data disaster recovery in different locations. Farmland Manager not only uses services at the IaaS layer, but also uses services at the PaaS layer, including Azure MySql services and PowerBI Embedded, so that all data can be managed digitally, reducing operating costs while making it very convenient to launch new services. The IT service architecture can be dynamically expanded to help companies respond quickly to business needs.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]