Into the digital development stage, the opponent is no longer just a big Xinjiang.
In the agricultural production sector, biotechnology and digital technology are the core two means of performance improvement. However, after nearly 40 years of development, the efficiency improvement brought by biotechnology has reached the bottleneck. This aspect is closely related to the technical bottleneck of biotechnology itself. On the other hand, consumers attach importance to food safety and political rights to environmental issues. Power drives agriculture to find new ways to increase its effectiveness.
In this context, precision fertilization, soil improvement, precision irrigation, and precision seeding through digital technology and intelligent hardware-driven production and management methods are regarded as the core means for improving agricultural efficiency in the next 20 years.
Plant protection drones are a common application in the field of precision fertilization. There are already two head companies in this field – Dajiang Agriculture and Extreme Flying Technology.
Daljiang entered the agricultural sector in 2015, using a low-cost strategy to harvest a small number of small and medium-sized brands’ market share – the new product T16 launched at the end of 2018 was 31,888 yuan. The price of the P series basic model launched by Extreme Flying Technology in early 2019 is about 50,000 yuan. According to the data provided by Extreme Flying Technology, the company’s shipments this year are expected to be about 20,000 units, and the annual revenue can reach 1 billion yuan.
More than hardware
Gaofei Technology was founded in Guangzhou in 2007 by Peng Bin. It entered the field of drones with its own flight control system. Later, it tried to promote UAV applications in the logistics industry with SF. In 2013, Feifei Technology began to explore the agricultural field and carried out plant protection drone spraying experiments in Xinjiang. Up to now, Feifei Technology has become an agricultural technology company integrating R&D manufacturers and agricultural automation equipment operators. It is equipped with Feifei Agriculture, Feifei Geography, Extreme Flying Materials XIOT, and Extreme Flying Agricultural Intelligent XAI. Sub-business section.
But in the eyes of others, Extreme Flying Technology is still a smart hardware company. From the perspective of the existing product line, this is indeed the case.
The application of the ultra-flying technology agricultural drone is mainly in the two directions of image acquisition and precision delivery. The former has the ability to carry the mapping and multi-spectral camera, and the latter has the ability to spray and sow in the air. P series plant protection drones, P series 2019 plant protection drone system has supported a variety of full self-service flight mode, suitable for a variety of terrains such as plains, mountains, hills, terraces, etc., can complete the spraying task for the field, orchard .
As of September 2019On the day, the company has more than 42,000 UAVs, and the total operating area has exceeded 310 million mu. According to the results of the second national land survey released by the Bureau of Land and Resources, China’s arable land area is about 2.03 billion mu.
In a recent interview with Peng Bin, it was discovered that Feifei Technology is undergoing an important transformation – from fertilization and sowing to the whole process of planting management, from intelligent hardware to digital agricultural platform to realize from drone Applied to the transformation of agricultural intelligence.
Peng Bin said that intelligent dismantling is unmanned and digitized. Under this goal, drones will not and should not become the boundary of Feifei Technology. In addition to the development and application of the agricultural brain XAI, the company has developed a two-year digital agricultural platform development. The platform has supported a series of functions such as weather inquiry, road survey, planting management, etc., which will mainly serve large-scale planting enterprises and farmers. Service center.
From the perspective of core business logic, Extreme Flying Technology uses agricultural drones to collect field data and plant management data. On the one hand, it provides digital management services and third-party social services for planting enterprises and agricultural service centers (such as On the other hand, the data can be used to establish the credit system and risk control model of the planting/growers, and the digital bridge between the growers/planting enterprises and the financial and insurance companies can be established. The social cooperation provides the data base for the rural credit cooperatives to provide loans to farmers.
It is understood that there are still more than 2 million mu of field data in the platform for internal testing, and this number is still increasing. In addition, Extreme Flying Technology already has the corresponding field IoT products to solve tasks such as data collection and field operations that the UAV cannot perform.
Why transform?
This shift is in line with the vision of Extreme Flying Technology’s “Promoting Global Agricultural Intelligence,” but more importantly, it meets the inherent requirements of Extreme Flying Technology’s expansion of the border to find new business growth points.
According to Peng Bin’s calculation, the number of agricultural drones in the country will reach saturation in millions of units, and the ceiling of hardware products is obvious. The digital agricultural platform is obviously a more sexy business story – high marginal efficiency and strong business extensibility, especially in the blue ocean that can rely on data to introduce financial and insurance services into the agricultural industrial chain.
In the case of The Climate corporation, which was acquired by Monsanto in October 2013 for $930 million, is an agricultural technology company based on the rapid rise of digital technology and data services. In the early days, The Climate mainly based on historical meteorological data, geological data, combined with weather forecast for comprehensive analysis, based on algorithm to predict the impact of weather on crop yield, and finally generate agricultural insurance policies to determine premiums and odds.
After the acquisition, the company has evolved into a digital agricultural platform: collecting all the data needed for agricultural production (weather information, soil conditions, agriculture)Crop growth status, etc.), helping farmers to develop scientific planting plans (providing seeding time selection, fertilization planning, yield forecasting, pest management, etc.). With Monsanto’s business advantage, as of July 2016, The Climate covered 1/3 of the total arable land (92 million acres) in the US market, and the wind control model established through farmer’s planting and transaction data remains It is the core resource for the platform to serve the insurance and financial industries.
Meng Shandu’s senior researcher, former The Climate Strategy Consultant and Technical Director Dr. Haitao Haitao returned to China to start a business, and wanted to build the Chinese version of The Climate through the digital technology, his background and the resources given by the Chinese Academy of Sciences soil. In the capital market, Jixi Technology has received much attention. It has already completed the angel round financing of Hongtai Fund Investment. This year, Sinochem Agriculture also launched two digital agricultural platforms for field crops and cash crops under the smart agriculture strategy – MAP Zhinong and MAP Hui Nong.
But Undoubtedly, Feifei Technology has the foundation and advantages in transforming digital agriculture. The biggest bottleneck in the development of digital agriculture in China is precisely at the data acquisition end. Due to the lack of high-quality data sources, domestic agricultural big data enterprises mostly integrate data collection, data analysis and mining, data application and other multi-line tasks, and data resources are among them. Basic conditions and entrance.
In the early days, in order to enable the plant protection drones to fully autonomous flight operations, it was necessary to map the drones based on the digital map of the field. The poor information infrastructure in the agricultural field allowed the company to build the field. The block database is combined with the self-developed RTK technology to achieve precise positioning. In recent years, the field data accumulated through manual mapping, extreme chivalry, and user uploading is a good resource for the company to cut into planting management, and tens of thousands of drones in the operating system continue to enrich this database.
The agricultural sector needs more patient capital
The number of investment in the agricultural sector and professional investment institutions have gone. Even in the wake of the industrial Internet and industrial upgrading, agriculture is a corner that has been forgotten. The core reason is that agriculture is a heavy industry with large investment, long cycle and slow returns. .
Talking about not refinancing after 2016, Peng Bin said that this aspect is related to the better cash flow of Extreme Flying Technology. On the other hand, agricultural enterprises need long-term patient capital, facing one year. a cooked crop growth gaugeLaws, digital products have to undergo 2-3 years of polishing, in order to make the product mature, and even face the challenges of data quality, data cleaning, data value mining to the final realization. Such industry rules require that capital that recognizes the long-term value of China’s agricultural development grow with the company.