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ABSTRACT
A large number of farms in developing countries are smallholder farms. In China, this trend is expected to persist for the foreseeable future. However, smallholder farmers in China face several challenges, including excessive fertilizer use for higher yields, low levels of education, aging and limited credit information. Moreover, they are struggling with a digital divide, which hampers their agricultural productivity and limits their economic and social integration. Agricultural services based on information and communication technology (ICT) can bridge the digital gap, but are hindered by complexity and cost. Aiming at serving the numerous smallholders and building a sustainable digital ecosystem, this paper presents a distributed agriculture service system that provides decision support to farmers by considering both social and physical information. The system is lightweight, low cost and intelligent, managing personnel, plots, crops and equipment using technologies such as wireless sensor networks, cloud computing and distributed systems architecture. Services include crop planning, production guidance, equipment control, etc. User terminals include computers, mobile applications and Applets. A case study on fruit production in a typical solar greenhouse illustrates the system's functionality. The distributed agricultural services system can well support smallholder farmers and promote sustainable agriculture.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes on contributors
Jing Hua
Jing Hua is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science with the Institute of Automaton, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interest covers computer science and agriculture, including virtual plant modeling, smart agriculture, programming languages, distributed computer systems, and computer graphics.
Haoyu Wang
Haoyu Wang is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science with the Institute of Automaton, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. His research interest covers computer science and agriculture, including virtual plant modeling, smart agriculture, programming languages, and information system.
Mengzhen Kang
Mengzhen Kang is currently an Associate Professor with the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and also with the School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. Her current research interests include parallel agriculture and computational plants.
Xiujuan Wang
Xiujuan Wang is currently an Associate Professor with the Institute of Automaton, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her current research interests include plant growth modeling and parallel agriculture.
Shaoxin Guo
Shaoxin Guo is currently an engineer with the Institute of Automaton, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His current research interests include smart agriculture, programming languages, and information system.
Fangle Chang
Fangle Chang is currently an Assistant Professor with Ningbo Innovation Center, Zhejiang University, Ningbo, China. Her research interest covers target detection and multi–source data fusion, complex system management and control.
Fei-Yue Wang
Fei–Yue Wang is currently a Professor with the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, also with the School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. His current research focuses on methods and applications for parallel systems, social computing, and knowledge automation.