Pinduoduo’s tomato-growing Smart Agriculture Competition has received hundreds of applications from scientists around the globe. The organisers intend to promote the adoption of agricultural technologies by smallholder farmers through this contest. Pinduoduo, China Agricultural University, and Zhejiang University organize the Smart Agriculture Competition annually.
For the final round of the competition, four teams are selected by a panel of experts and growers from a variety of backgrounds, including horticulture, crop modelling, algorithm design and policy-making.
Over the next six months, Pinduoduo’s finalists will work on their horticulture plans at the smart greenhouse base in Yunnan province.
The head of the competition’s judging panel, Zhao Chunjiang, is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Zhao Chunjiang explained, “We are delighted to see young talents across the world joining our Smart Agriculture Competition,
“We hope to build an innovative and open platform to stimulate the creativity of young scientists and to promote China’s agriculture modernisation together.”
The participants must develop smart agriculture technologies that meet China’s agricultural requirements at a reasonable cost. Nutritional content, environmental sustainability, and yield and cost are the main components of this year’s evaluation.
By hosting the event, the organisers hope to inspire more youth to take agriculture as a career and change the stereotype that agriculture is a labour-intensive, low-tech industry.
“Agriculture is the foundation of the development of human society and the nexus of social welfare, security, health and environment sustainability,” says senior vice president at Pinduoduo, Andre Zhu.
“As China’s largest platform for agriculture, we want to contribute more to promote environmentally sustainable practices and groom the next generation to support agricultural modernisation.”
Competition finalists eagerly awaited moving on to the final phase of implementation.
“Our goal is to promote the development and application of information technology in agriculture,” explained Team CyberTomato, one of four finalists.
“We hope to create a high-quality and high-yield model through technological innovation, integration and application, starting from tomato planting and extend it to other crops.”
