Technology beats humans at growing strawberries in Pinduoduo smart agriculture competition

Pinduoduo Inc.Tue, December 15, 2020,

Pinduoduo’s Smart Agri Competition

A member of the traditional farming teams tending to the strawberry beds at the Smart Agriculture Competition. (Source: Pinduoduo)

Pinduoduo’s Smart Agri Competition

Close-up shot of strawberries grown in automated greenhouses at the Smart Agriculture Competition (Source: Pinduoduo)

Pinduoduo’s Smart Agri Competition

Sensors deployed in the greenhouse to monitor plant growth at the Smart Agriculture Competition (Source: Pinduoduo)

Pinduoduo’s Smart Agriculture Competition took place over four months and pitted data scientists against top strawberry growers

Technology teams produced 196% more strawberries by weight on average compared with traditional farmers

Technology teams also outperformed farmers in return on investment by an average of 75.5%

SHANGHAI, China, Dec. 16, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Technology beat farmers at growing strawberries in the inaugural Smart Agriculture Competition organized by Pinduoduo Inc. (NASDAQ: PDD), China’s largest agri-focused technology platform, underscoring its potential to raise agricultural productivity and increase food security.

The four technology teams, which employed data analysis, intelligent sensors and greenhouse automation, produced an average of 6.86 kilograms of strawberries, or 196% more than the 2.32 kilograms average for the three teams of traditional growers.

The technologists also outperformed farmers in terms of return on investment by an average of 75.5%, according to the competition organizers.

CyberFarmer.HortiGraph, a team made up mostly of researchers from the China Agricultural University and National Agriculture Intelligence Equipment Engineering Technical Research Center, placed first in the competition.

The four-month competition, which ended on Nov. 30, 2020, was co-organized by Pinduoduo and the China Agricultural University, with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as technical adviser. The contest is the first cross-disciplinary smart agriculture competition in China organized by a technology company and university to develop planting methods to raise productivity and yield.

The push into smart agriculture is part of Pinduoduo’s broader goal of helping China realize the full economic potential of its vast agriculture resources. One of the first steps in improving productivity is to raise the level of digitization across the value chain, from production to the transportation and sale of food.

Precision farming technology can help improve the crop on the production end, while agriculture analytics can cut food wastage by reducing mismatches in supply and demand. For the growers, e-commerce allows them to tap on a much larger market than the local wholesaler, freeing them from the constraints of geography.

“Technology is the force multiplier that helps both the people who grow the food and the people who eat it,” said Andre Zhu, senior vice president of Pinduoduo. “Investing in agriculture benefits the greatest number of people. We are happy to play the role of matchmaker and enabler.”

Pinduoduo will explore promoting the technology developed by the teams in the competition to working farms in China. The company operates the largest agricultural e-commerce platform in China and works with farmers from impoverished regions of the country to sell their produce to urban consumers.

In the competition, the technology teams had the advantage of being able to control temperature and humidity through greenhouse automation, the organizers noted. They were also more precise at controlling the use of water and nutrients. The traditional farmers had to achieve the same tasks by hand and experience.

CyberFarmer.HortiGraph, the winning team, employed knowledge graph technology to collect grower experience, historical cultivation data, and strawberry image recognition. This was then combined with water, fertilizer and greenhouse climate models to create an intelligent decision strategy for growing strawberries.

“This competition was a successful journey for the team to explore how technology can be used in agriculture,” said Lin Sen, the team leader for CyberFarmer.HortiGraph and a researcher based at Beijing’s National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture.

The Smart Agriculture Competition has inspired at least one of the technology teams to commercialize their research, showing the potential market demand for smart agriculture solutions.

Zhi Duo Mei, comprising a group of university researchers, set up a company of the same name to provide its strawberry-planting technology to farming cooperatives after receiving numerous inquiries during the competition.

"In agriculture, traditional farmers distrust data scientists, thinking they are flashy yet useless; data scientists also look down on farmers, thinking they are too old-fashioned," said Cheng Biao, the leader of the Zhi Duo Mei team. "Through this competition, we realized the importance of combining both sides' advantages and working together."

The competition helped Sun Yuqing, a member of Yanjiutian, the all-women team of farmers in the competition, change her view of technology.

“For agriculture to advance, we need new techniques, new talent,” said Sun.

About Pinduoduo Inc.

Pinduoduo operates China's largest agri-focused technology platform, providing an online marketplace that connects millions of agricultural producers with consumers across the country. A pioneer of interactive commerce and the consumer-to-manufacturer model, Pinduoduo aims to bring more businesses and people into the digital economy so that local communities can benefit from the increased productivity and convenience through new market opportunities.

For more information on Pinduoduo news and industry trends, please visit our content hub at http://stories.pinduoduo-global.com/.

For media enquiries, please contact us at internationalmedia@pinduoduo.com

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Why Alibaba rival Pinduoduo is investing in agritech

Rita Liao

Wed, December 16, 2020

Back in 2018, Pinduoduo sent shock waves through the investor community when it raised $1.6 billion from a Nasdaq listing as a three-year-old company. Online shoppers in China were excited to see its rise as an alternative to long-time market dominators Alibaba and JD.com.

But the startup founded by former Google engineer Colin Huang has ambitions well beyond e-commerce. It's answering the Chinese government's call to modernize the country's agriculture and bolster the rural economy.

Life in China has become highly digital in many facets, from retail and entertainment to education and healthcare. But agriculture remains an exception. A McKinsey report from late 2017 showed that agriculture was among the least digitized industries in China. Pinduoduo saw an opportunity in the gap and started life by selling fruits online. Over time it has grown into a comprehensive e-commerce platform rivaling Alibaba, but agriculture "has always been close to the heart of Pinduoduo since its inception," said Pinduoduo's senior vice president Andre Zhu.

"Investing in smart agriculture is an extension of what we do and guided by our goal of promoting digital inclusion."

Instead of a standalone department, the firm's agricultural endeavor is a company- and even society-wide effort. Its strategy and investment team takes the lead to identify solutions targeting all stages of agriculture that the company can help scale up. At the implementation stage, the team might then tap its operational colleagues for contacts at various local governments and traditional farms that want to try the technologies.

"At least on the downstream distribution side, on e-commerce marketplaces for agricultural products, I would say we are relatively ahead compared to the rest of the world," Xin Yi Lim, executive director of sustainability and agriculture impact at Pinduoduo, told TechCrunch in an interview.

In 2019, nearly 600,000 merchants sold farm produce through Pinduoduo. That translated to some 12 million farmers who supplied their fruits and vegetables to the merchants. In August, Pinduoduo pledged to sell $145 billion worth of farm produce annually by 2025. The number was $21 billion in 2019.

"But it's really the upstream portion that we're hoping to encourage and drive further investment in," Lim added.

As such, the e-commerce giant has been traveling up the agricultural lifecycle, from building logistics infrastructure for distribution to equipping farmers with marketing know-how. In 2019, it trained close to 500,000 farm operators through its online e-commerce business institute.

Farmers in Yunnan Province learn how to open and operate a store on Pinduoduo at the Duo Duo University. / Photo: Pinduoduo

When it comes to production, Pinduoduo is able to track purchase behavior from its hundreds of millions of buyers and tell farmers what they should plant and how much they should price their products, an approach in line with the firm's larger direct-to-consumer strategy to cut traditional middlemen costs.

The e-commerce firm is also hoping to gather agronomic expertise for its farm suppliers. It kickstarted a smart farming competition this year, calling teams from around the world to grow strawberries using artificial intelligence and connected devices. They were graded on criteria such as the fruit's sweetness, energy and fertilizer use, and their AI strategy. The winner's design would then be rolled out at one of the AI-powered Duo Duo Farms, a project jointly launched by Pinduoduo and the provincial government of Yunnan to let farmers sell directly on the e-commerce platform.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg of Pinduoduo's agricultural long game. The firm doesn't disclose exactly how much it plans to invest in the field, though Lim said "compared to some of the other players in the industry, our involvement in agriculture is definitely more comprehensive."

The company looks for investment opportunities outside China as well. While domestic players come with more affordable hardware applications, especially drones and sensors, more mature solutions around crop modeling and prediction are found in Western countries where large commercial farms prevail, Lim noted.

Agritech adoption among Pinduoduo farmers is still "relatively small" because the firm's smart farming initiative is in the early stage. But the e-commerce upstart might be well-positioned to drive the development of agritech in China.

Different from the U.S. and Australia, China is dominated by small-scale farms that often can't afford to buy advanced farming equipment. Lacking demand, agritech startups have had difficulty fundraising to subsequently invest in customer acquisition and lowering their price point, Lim explained.

"Pinduoduo can already connect [agritech startups] with a wide pool of potential customers. I think that helps to ease a little bit of the initial pain point," said Lim.

Finally, injecting technologies into farming could help retain talent in China's vast rural hinterland, which is losing young labor to bigger, more affluent cities.

"In the long term, we [could] make farming more efficient and easier. There could potentially be a transformation in the whole structure of the farming industry. We could see young people feel that 'I can actually be an entrepreneur. There are these tools that can give me more control over the output,'" Lim suggested.

"There are potentially people who today are not farmers who could then start to see farming as a viable alternative."

Pinduoduo named digital agriculture pioneer at 2020 World Digital Agriculture Conference

Pinduoduo Inc. Tue, December 15, 2020

SHANGHAI, China, Dec. 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pinduoduo Inc. (NASDAQ: PDD), China’s largest agri-focused technology platform, was named a pioneer in digital agriculture at a major conference, with its “cloud agriculture” model recognized as one of the top 10 achievements in digital agriculture in the world.

The accolades were handed out at the 2020 World Digital Agriculture Conference held in Guangzhou, China, on Dec. 12. The conference aims to demonstrate the integration of digital technology and modern agriculture, and the organizing committee selected several case studies to showcase how digital technology empowers agriculture.

Pinduoduo has focused on agriculture since its establishment in 2015 and has become the go-to destination for high quality, great value agricultural products. In 2019, the transaction volume of farm products reached RMB 136.4 billion (US$20.8 billion) on Pinduoduo’s online marketplace.
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As of the end of 2019, Pinduoduo has covered almost all agricultural production areas in China, with more than 12 million agrarian producers directly connected to the marketplace serving more than 700 million consumers.

Pinduoduo has brought a systems approach to tackling the inter-related issues at various points of the agricultural value chain, committing substantial resources and investments to solve entrenched structural problems in the industry.

The company’s initiatives include improving downstream market access for farmers and training younger e-commerce talent, revamping midstream logistics infrastructure to reduce waste, lower costs and speed up the delivery of agricultural products. Pinduoduo also works with industry partners and universities to develop upstream technology to increase the resilience of the food supply chain.

Earlier this year, Pinduoduo jointly organized the Smart Agriculture Competition with the China Agricultural University, under the technical guidance of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The competition sought to identify cost-efficient and scalable agricultural technology that can be promoted as standardized solutions across China. The final results are expected to be released on Dec. 16, 2020.

About Pinduoduo Inc.

Pinduoduo is an innovative and fast-growing technology platform that provides buyers with value-for-money merchandise and fun and interactive shopping experiences. The Pinduoduo mobile platform offers a comprehensive selection of attractively priced merchandise, featuring a dynamic social shopping experience that leverages social networks effectively.

For more information on Pinduoduo news and industry trends, please visit our content hub at http://stories.pinduoduo-global.com