This is the venue of the Third Smart Agriculture Competition, an annual precision farming contest launched by e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, an app originally designed to connect farmers with consumers directly. The competition, with around 80 percent of participants born after 1990, has become a platform where young and talented researchers in the fields of agriculture and technology can work on real-life problems faced by smallholder farmers. It has also become a testing field for agricultural technology born in the laboratory. This year's edition was organized by Pinduoduo and Bright Seedbase Technology, the seedling arm of Chinese food and beverage conglomerate Bright Food.

Four teams from Beijing and Shanghai have stood out from 30 plus teams to reach the final competition: the CyberFarmer, Lettus Grow, the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University teams. Over the course of 90 days till the final's conclusion in mid-May, the four teams will take on the challenge of producing crops with higher yields, better quality and shorter growth cycles, and with less energy.

Throughout the competition, the teams will explore ways to solve key issues hindering the development of vertical farming—a process in which crops are grown in layers on top of each other, rather than in traditional, horizontal rows, resulting in a higher crop yield per square foot of land used—and promote the progress of smart agriculture.

Planting pros 

Plant factories are facilities that aid the steady production of high-quality vegetables all year round by artificially controlling the cultivation environment including light, temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide concentration and nutrient solution.

It is a type of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), which refers to the production of plants and their products, such as vegetables and flowers, inside controlled environment structures such as greenhouses and vertical farms.

The plant factory is considered the highest level in CEA because compared with greenhouses, which have realized partial control of the cultivation environment, these factories have full artificial control over their cultivation environment.

China's CEA originated in the 1980s, a time when the country was not yet able to provide a stable vegetable supply all year round. Farmers then started building plastic greenhouses, which were an effective and inexpensive way to increase farm yields by extending the growing season and exerting control over temperature and lighting conditions.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, CEA-produced vegetables accounted for around 30 percent of China's total vegetable output as of last October, becoming an important part of vegetable production.

Zheng Jianfeng, head of the CyberFarmer team who is pursuing a postdoctoral degree at China Agricultural University, told GeekPark, a Chinese innovators community that provides real time updates on product manufacturers, that China's CEA industry lags behind that of countries such as the Netherlands and Japan because it mostly consists of greenhouses. Intelligent greenhouses and plant factories currently account for only a small proportion of the industry. This is why he decided to conduct plant factory studies.

By controlling the internal environment, plant factories can produce vegetables about two to four times faster compared with typical outdoor cultivation. In addition, the use of vertical farming (a multi-shelf system) better facilitates the mass production of vegetables in a small space.

The growth cycle of vegetables cultivated in plant factories is around 34 days, half the time required for those grown in soil.

Plant factories can also produce higher-quality vegetables as they involve less chemicals and pesticides given the closed environment provides ample shelter from bacteria and pests; plus, the air and water have all been purified. Moreover, because plant factories are often located near or in cities, transportation is much faster, hence reducing the carbon footprint and ensuring the produce is still fresh when it hits store shelves.

These factories can be an effective way to solve food security problems as the global population keeps increasing, arable land is decreasing and the aging of the agricultural labor force is on the verge of becoming detrimental to production.

On the other hand, it has provided solutions to guarantee sufficient food supply in areas not suitable for growing vegetables such as the desert, extremely cold regions—and even outer space.

Costly cons 

However, plant factories' high costs have hindered their commercialization.

The cost for one kg of ordinary lettuce is 4 ($0.58) to 8 yuan ($1.16), but for lettuce produced by a plant factory, that price tag can rise as high as 20 yuan ($2.9), as a plant factory consumes 10 kW of electricity to grow 1 kg of said produce.

This makes energy consumption an important criterion for judges to evaluate the performance of the teams participating in the competition.

Wang Jinhua, director of the agricultural business department of Bright Seedbase Technology who is on the competition's panel of judges, told GeekPark competitors need to strike a balance between output and cost.

"Only by reducing costs can the consumer base of plant factories expand, which will in turn promote the industry's development," Wang said.

Zheng Jianfeng, head of the CyberFarmer team, told Chinese news outlet Shanghai Observer the costs of an LED-lit plant factory include energy consumption, equipment and labor costs. Energy consumption and labor costs make up approximately 20 and 30 percent of the total cost, respectively, and lighting expenditure accounts for 50 to 60 percent of overall energy costs. Throughout the competition, his team focuses on reducing energy consumption, and that of lighting specifically.

Bao Hua, head of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University team, is an expert in energy control. "We will treat the container as if it were an architectural design and apply our experiences in controlling architecture's energy consumption to plant factories [because energy consumption can be seen as one of the main concerns in architecture and environmental design]," he told Shanghai Observer. He hopes to have reduced energy consumption by 40 percent by the time the competition concludes.

A plant factory involves several disciplines including botany, biology, engineering and computer science. The four teams that made it to the final feature one common denominator: They all include scientists from different backgrounds such as agronomists and data scientists. 

Xu Dan, head of the Lettus Grow team and founder of Beijing Hortipolaris Co. Ltd., an agricultural company, told Shanghai Observer that a plant factory needs to be supported by a multitude of sensors and big data algorithms for plantation monitoring and control.

Inside a plant factory, the artificial intelligence system gathers data such as the growth speed and photosynthetic rate of the plants through sensors and analyzes whether the plants are in good condition and what they require more or less of. Based on the analysis, the system then automatically adjusts the plant factory's temperature, lighting, humidity and carbon dioxide concentration accordingly to enable the plants to grow better. "We want to see how far artificial intelligence can go in agricultural production and how it can help reduce the margin of error and improve efficiency," Xu said. Whoever may end up winning, when it comes to their research, these teams are not missing a beet.

(Print Edition Title: Not Missing a Beet) 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon 

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