Exclusive: Alibaba gets into farming – without getting its hands dirty

Photo credit: Zhao Jiankang / 123RF

In China, Alibaba is deploying artificial intelligence to help farmers cut costs and increase yields. From their smartphones, farmers can now monitor whether bugs are munching away on their apple fields, or if grapes are ready to be picked.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of the ecommerce group, is debuting its proprietary ET Agricultural Brain initiative today. The project employs visual recognition and real-time environmental monitoring to track the growth conditions of crops and livestock. The reams of data gathered will be turned into insights for farmers using machine learning algorithms.

The cloud giant, which IDC says is China’s largest public cloud provider, doesn’t reach out to farmers directly. Instead, it supplies the software to agricultural corporations and cooperatives for a fee. These entities, in turn, train farmers to use the technology.

The data that ET Agricultural Brain processes belongs to its enterprise clients, an Alibaba Cloud spokesperson told Tech in Asia.

We don’t farm pigs ourselves because we don’t think we are good at it. Our advantage is the technological part, so we supply that knowledge to [farmers] to help them better raise pigs and chickens.

Working with organizations allows the company to reach farmers “on a greater scale and in a more efficient way,” Simon Hu, head of Alibaba Cloud, tells Tech in Asia in an interview.

The AI project has already been rolled out to pig farmers, but the cloud group realized that “there was a strong demand for technological application in crops production as well,” he adds.

ET Agricultural Brain is part of Alibaba Cloud’s ET Brain ambition, an all-encompassing program that applies AI to tackle issues across traditional industries such as city planning, industrial manufacturing, health care, and environmental protection.

The cloud giant says that by bringing AI to agriculture, it hopes to increase efficiency of production and assist the Chinese government in alleviating poverty. Many impoverished communities in China consist of farmers.

See: China hits roadblocks as it spends billions to help farmers sell online

Whether its goals will be met on a grand scale remains to be seen, but the program’s early adaptors offer some clues. Tequ Group, a Sichuan-based pig farming enterprise, has used ET Agricultural Brain to induce each sow to give birth to three more newborns a year. Out in the fields, the technology has helped fruit and vegetable company Haisheng Group save an estimated US$3 million per apple farm per year.

The platform model

Alibaba isn’t the only ecommerce giant to dabble in agriculture. Its archrival JD.com has a pilot project to help poor households make money byraising chickens. NetEase, China’s second-largest gaming company that has been doubling down in ecommerce in recent years, has built a 2.2 million-square-meter farm to raise pigs. Unlike its counterparts, Alibaba adopts a “platform” model and stays clear of production.

See: Journey to the West: How China’s online retailers are taking the battle to the rural front