Researcher at cutting age of plant technology
-
Gu Xiaoxiao checks vegetable seedlings ready for transplantation at the Leafa plant factory in Pudong.
Jiang Xiaowei / SHINE -
Gu Xiaoxiao put cups of seedlings on the machine from which they are to be transplanted to the production lines.
Jiang Xiaowei / SHINE -
The transplantation machine.
Jiang Xiaowei / SHINE -
The transplantation machine.
Jiang Xiaowei / SHINE -
The transplantation machine.
Jiang Xiaowei / SHINE -
The seedlings are transplanted to the production lines by a cart.
Jiang Xiaowei / SHINE -
The seedlings are transplanted to the production lines by a cart.
Jiang Xiaowei / SHINE -
The cart takes over the cups of seedlings and transplants them to the production lines taking the route that's fed to it by codes printed on the ground.
Jiang Xiaowei / SHINE
Gu Xiaoxiao takes a bucket of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to a greenhouse, pours the fertilizer mixture into a pool in the ground and mixes it up.
The diluted fertilizer is then pumped through numerous tubes to soilless beds, the cradles of life to the vegetables grown in them.
Just five years ago, in this greenhouse facility in Chongming District, known as a "plant factory" for its controlled plant cultivation environment, human labor was involved in most of the production processes.
"I felt like a pig farmer, but fortunately a machine that prepares fertilizers now does the job," said Gu, a researcher with the Shanghai Agricultural Machinery Research Institute. "Still I couldn't help but wonder, why can't machines take over the rest of the human labor here?"
Gu, 35, a native of Qidong in Jiangsu Province, studied hydraulic engineering at China Agricultural University in Beijing, and landed her current job in Shanghai to try her hand at agricultural engineering.
To better understand how the plant factory worked, Gu became a helping hand there in 2016, and that experience, she said, made her more aware of the urgency to replace human labor in agriculture.
"Most of the farmers there are in their 60s and 70s. Following them, I transplanted seedlings from plates to the production lines," she said. "It was not much muscle work, but repeating the same movement for a long time could also make one feel sore all over."
As it's an open secret that agriculture in many places keeps losing young workers these days, this urgency is even more heightened.
Human labor still dominates in most agricultural cooperatives where vegetables are planted. The cooperatives, where small family farms work together as a business, are major players in agricultural production in Shanghai. The city has extended experiments to replace human labor with machines in 18 vegetable-planting projects, and the most successful one has already replaced over 80 percent of human labor with machines.
Vegetables are key crops in Shanghai. The city's over 24 million residents consume 4,000 tons of vegetables every day.
Gu's quest to build an unmanned plant factory later started at the Pudong factory of local agricultural business Leafa.
Attempts at designing transplantation machinery for plant factories have yielded many results, but in most cases, the seedlings are placed in a large plate and dug out by the machine to be transplanted elsewhere. This could hurt the small and fragile seedlings in the process.
Instead, Gu and her team place seedlings in small plastic cups and use a machine to transport them to the production lines where the plants continue to grow in the cups with fertilized water flowing underneath. The cups fit almost all kinds of vegetables produced in a plant factory, such as lettuce, celery and spinach.
At this stage, the seeds are still sown in a large plate with human intervention in their transplantation to the cups, but eventually they will be sown by machine. Gu and her team have been seeking a solution to harvesting the plants in cups with a machine so that no human will be required in the entire production process.
-
Gu Xiaoxiao (second from left) and her colleagues check out an automated rotary tiller at the Diantian Robot Smart Farm in Jinshan District.
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
Gu Xiaoxiao and her colleagues work on an automated rotary tiller in Diantian Robot Smart Farm in Jinshan District.
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
The agricultural robot R&D center at the farm.
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
An automated sowing machine at the farm developed by Gu's institute.
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
An automated sowing machine at the farm developed by Gu's institute.
Chen Huizhi / SHINE
Gu found herself in paddy fields in suburban Jinshan District in 2018, where she and her team challenged themselves to devise an irrigation system that allows centralized control, addressing the needs of local farmers.
In paddy farming, farmers usually use flood irrigation, in which water flows from a certain point to irrigate a large area of fields. This irrigation method is not friendly to water preservation, and human labor is inevitable in channeling the water to different parts of the fields by opening and closing holes in the ground from which water is pumped for irrigation.
"Farmers in their 70s and 80s have to walk up and down the fields, 400 mu (26.7 hectares) in size, to irrigate them in the hottest season of the year, because there is no alternative," Gu said. The size of the fields equals to 35 soccer pitches.
There have been solutions making use of electromagnetic valves, which are often applied in liquid control in industrial production, but they're not ideal for cost-sensitive paddy farming. Also, cables in the ground could be damaged by cultivating machines, while wireless communication is not reliable in farmland.
A mechanical device that works like a flush toilet was their solution which was co-initiated by the cooperative workers. The device, placed in the soil, can open and close the water valve on its own according to water levels. They also invented a similar device that is placed in the water channels.
However, problems remain.
"We are yet to develop a common device for all kinds of paddy fields that works regardless of their soil levels or the ways their irrigation channels are organized," Gu said.
Testing the devices in paddy fields, Gu often got herself muddy all over and drew attention of people when she took a train from Jinshan back to urban Shanghai.
"Once a train station worker asked me what I did, and when I told her that I was a farmer, she wondered why I didn't dust myself off well before going to town," Gu said.
A humble woman with always with a warm and broad smile on her face, Gu said she is devoted to an important mission.
"The modernization of agriculture is an odyssey, but it's the key to food safety of our country," she said.
Gu has taken part in projects of her institute that yielded 16 agricultural appliances which have been applied to over 1,300 hectares of farmland in Shanghai. Some of them are being upgraded with the latest technologies such as the Internet of Things, path planning, visual identity systems (VIS) and speech recognition. Equipped with VIS and GPS, for example, a sowing machine they're testing now can do its job without people driving a tractor to tow it around.