How to dance in the wind in "Internet + Agriculture"

"now, in addition to our own fields, our family has also contracted some land to grow some safe and pollution-free red beans and corn. Anyway, there is no shortage of sales, and my parents are also very happy to do it." Xiao Chu, an Anhui girl who works in Beijing, told the Science and Technology Daily that she never thought her family could make money by selling agricultural products. This is mainly due to the Internet.

In the strategic layout of "Internet +", "Internet + agriculture" is a hot spot. Data show that rural e-commerce sales exceeded 140 billion in 2014, and more than 1.6 million rural online stores were registered on Taobao and Tmall alone. By 2016, the total volume of China's rural online shopping market is likely to exceed 460 billion yuan. 10 or 20 years later, the rural online shopping market may surpass that of cities.

Sow the seeds of the Internet on the fertile soil of agriculture, what on earth will you reap? How will the Internet change the form of agriculture? At the recent "Decoding Internet Agriculture and Technology-driven Agricultural products Safety Summit Forum", experts expressed their views on these issues.

Internet bigwigs are marching into agriculture

Recently, Cloud Farm Group, which received 10 million US dollars strategic investment from Lenovo Holdings, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the people's Government of Fengxian County, Jiangsu Province and JD.com Group. Founded in August 2013, Cloud Farm has 18 subsidiaries and is an agricultural Internet high-tech integrated service provider integrating agricultural e-commerce, agricultural customization and trading, rural logistics, agricultural technology services and rural finance.

In fact, agriculture has become an important market favored by Internet bosses and capital. Prior to this, Alibaba and JD.com both announced the full speed launch of rural e-commerce strategy. Ali launched the plan of thousands of counties and villages in rural Taobao. In the next three to five years, it will invest 10 billion yuan to set up 1000 county-level e-commerce service centers and 100000 village-level service stations across the country, covering 1/3 of the counties and 1/6 of the rural areas. Moreover, Ali is also laying out the industrial chain model of deep integration of Internet and agriculture, and plans to develop rural e-commerce based on its entire ecosystem. Alipay, Yu'ebao, Zhaobao, Ant Micro-loan and other businesses have been linked to rural areas. In the future, big data will be directly involved in the rural financial market to meet the capital needs of farmers.

JD.com also launched the recruitment of "rural agents" and the landing of "JD.com help service stores" to explore the two-way circulation mode in the rural market. The activity of "JD.com sending seeds to the countryside" was once hotly discussed, in which JD.com provided high-quality seeds of agricultural products, which were cultivated and planted by farmers in rural areas, and sold through JD.com platform after harvest. JD.com is now also beginning to set foot in the agricultural material market. If the layout of this industrial chain can be formed, it will bring changes to agricultural production. Farmers are only responsible for production and other links will be handed over to the platform.

The rapid development of rural informatization has laid the foundation for "Internet + Agriculture". At the end of 2014, the number of rural Internet users in China reached 178 million, and the penetration rate of Internet in rural areas increased rapidly from just over 10% in 2008 to nearly 30% at the end of 2014. With the continuous improvement of information infrastructure, the popularity of the Internet in rural areas continues to accelerate, and the convenience of access to information in rural areas has been greatly improved.

"it used to be a household mode of production, so it is difficult to popularize new technologies on a large scale. Now there are about 900000 family farms in China, which is conducive to the development of information technology and other new technologies." Zhao Chunjiang, director of the National Agricultural Information Engineering Research Center, said.

The development of agricultural e-commerce is facing bottleneck

Apples in Yantai, pears in Dangshan, fresh hairy crabs. Almost everything you want to eat can now be bought online. Indeed, at present, the main format of China's "Internet + agriculture" is e-commerce. According to the estimates of relevant institutions, the market scale of chemical fertilizers, seeds and fodder in China's agriculture alone exceeds one trillion yuan.

Xiong Bin, co-founder of Cloud Farm, said: "since the beginning of last year, more and more enterprises have begun to enter the field of 'Internet + Agriculture'. In addition to agricultural products, some agricultural enterprises are also based on their original channels and resources. expand services from offline to online."

High quality and relatively favorable prices due to the removal of intermediate links are the main reasons why the agricultural e-commerce platform attracts users. However, with "helping farmers sell agricultural products and helping buyers find sources of goods" as the main mode, a mu of farmland has been exposed as "capital chain broken", "large layoffs", as well as "capital withdrawal", "transaction data fraud" and other problems. Agricultural e-commerce in the traditional Internet model is in a crisis of public opinion.

According to the analysis of some experts, the problem is that agricultural products are non-standard products, and for channel merchants, procurement still needs to be carried out offline, and various procedures such as sampling and inspection cannot be transferred to the online. At the same time, the docking mode of traditional bulk channels is just the migration from offline to online, and no fundamental change has taken place.

At the same time, Zhang Yaowen, senior partner of Analysys Business Solutions, believes that the development of China's rural circulation industry still lags behind is also an important reason for restricting the development of agricultural e-commerce. The lack of unified planning, the uneven development of logistics infrastructure in various regions, the limited coverage of guaranteed rural logistics, and the scattered demand in rural areas make the distribution problem of "the last kilometer" particularly prominent. at present, socialized logistics still can not effectively serve villages and towns. In addition to the circulation of agricultural production and living materials, the circulation problem of agricultural products is more prominent, because agricultural products usually have fresh characteristics, fragile, perishable, and have higher requirements for the control of aging and transportation process.