This time, the “second brother” is really worth the money.
文 | 秘丛丛
Edit | Huang Wei
No.: 001
Variety: Lie Black Pig
Place of Birth: Jiaozhou, Shandong
Date of Birth: April 25, 2019
Show time: October 25, 2019
Sports: 170 km
Disease history: 0 illnesses
This is a brief history of “pig birth”. In the future, you may only need to scan the QR code of pork to get the above information, especially health and safety information.
African swine fever makes people aware of the importance of food traceability. When the chain of traceability information is complete enough, the “black box” of food safety can become transparent. This poses a challenge to traditional farming methods that lack genetically derived genes.
At present, China is the largest pig breeding area in the world, with an annual output of about 700 million pigs. According to iMedia Research (Ai Media Consulting) data, pork accounted for 62.9% of China’s meat consumption in 2018. It can be seen that pork is just a Chinese demand. “If we calculate the price of live pigs, the current 700 million pigs are about 1.2 trillion yuan in market size.” Wei Wu, a partner of Tianqi Venture Capital, said in an interview.
But the trillion-dollar market is still an intelligent “squatting place”. According to Netease CEO Ding Lei, China’s pig industry has remained at the level of 100 years ago. In other words, the domestic aquaculture industry is still in the traditional stage of relying on “teachers” to impart experience. Although the number of live pigs is the highest in the world, the efficiency of raising pigs is not proportional. Compared with the United States, we have to raise a pig at twice the cost, with an average of 10 pigs per sow per year.
In recent years, as the Internet giants began to pay attention to the “pigs standing on the wind”, big data and AI gradually broke through the “dimensions” and entered the farms, for example, using pig face recognition technology to count pigs, and patrol robots. Internal environment, automatic feeding and feeding system, personalized and quantitative control of pig feeding… No one knows more intelligently than AI, AI pigs become a matter of course. As pork prices soar, many people are also imagining that AI can make prices fall. “If we want to solve the price problem fundamentally, we need large-scale farming,” said Dr. Zhang Junyi of Communications. He is concerned about 5G technology and has deep contact with head pig companies.
The Chinese pig breeding market is dominated by retail investors, with several traditional pig farming companies accounting for less than 10%, but the US has reached more than 40%. This has caused aquaculture to be deeply affected byShould be “affected, that is, the price of pork rises and falls a lot. And the existence of the pig cycle, so that retail investors choose to expand or exit production with the rise and fall of prices, has a strong blindness.
Even if giants such as Ali, JD, and NetEase are “entering the pigpen”, how long does their AI technology support their stay on the “Pig Swim”? Will the price of pigs change because of them?
Image from Oriental IC
The self-cultivation of giant AI pigs
Ali raises pigs, mainly relying on Alibaba Cloud’s ET agricultural brain. It first cuts in from the farm’s core indicator PSY (the number of live piglets provided by a sow in a year), and Alibaba Cloud engineers collaborate with pig scientists to develop the “Sow Pregnancy Diagnostic Algorithm”, which aims to improve the birth of pig farms. the amount.
In 2018, Alibaba Cloud and the Sichuan Special Economic Zone Group cooperated with “the world’s first AI pig raising project”. “Our algorithm can help the PSY of the farm to increase the efficiency by a minimum of 5% and increase the profit by nearly 10%.” Fei Xiang, senior product manager of Alibaba Cloud ET Agricultural Brain, said at the Yunqi Conference in 2019. In addition, Alibaba Cloud also monitors the body temperature and morbidity of pigs through infrared temperature measurement technology to prevent cross-infection. At present, Alibaba Cloud has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the field of AI pig raising, and it is estimated that 10 million pigs will be produced by 2020.
In monitoring pig growth and health, Jingdong chose to develop and apply “pig face recognition” technology, which solves the problem of pig “identification”. Li Jialong, deputy general manager of Jingdong Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, has revealed that Jingdong Digital’s pig face recognition combined with voiceprint recognition, the accuracy of pig resolution has reached 100%. Pig face recognition is also synchronized with the intelligent feeding machine, which can control the weight difference of the pigs.
The back of Jingdong pigs is mainly based on Jingdong Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, which was born in Jingdong Digital Technology in 2018. Prior to this, it invested in Jilin Jingqi Shen Organic Agriculture Co., Ltd., which specializes in black pork and mountain black pigs, and cooperates with AI pig raising project. According to Jingdong’s calculation, Jingdong’s intelligent pig raising can be reduced by 30%-50%.