'Digital Apple' Boosts Incomes in Shaanxi Province’s Luochuan County

Alibaba’s cooperating grower Sang Yanhai trims the trees in the fruit orchard. [Photo courtesy of Alibaba]

Located in northwest China, Luochuan County, Yan’an City, Shaanxi Province, is a major producer of high-quality apples. The crop is grown on 530,000 mu of land in its borders, and yields of around 900,000 tons are achieved per annum. In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult for the county to sell its apples, however. Consumer feedback indicated that the main problem was that the fruit “did not taste good enough,” which compelled people involved in the industry to think about how to solve the problem.

It proved necessary to enhance the cultivation process in order to address the situation. One of the world’s leading agrochemical leaders, Sinochem Holdings is engaged in seed production, plant protection, crop nutrition, modern agricultural services, and the entire digital agriculture industrial chain among other areas. Sinochem subsidiary Syngenta Group – one of the world’s leading players in agricultural technology innovation – created a service known as the Modern Agriculture Platform (MAP) in order to help farmers modernise their farms in a manner that is sustainable, traceable, and climate-friendly and connect them to premium buyers, thereby increasing the quality of their crops and their profitability.

Syngenta Group’s MAP team developed a digital industry upgrade plan designed to help Luochuan produce better-tasting apples in cooperation with e-commerce giant Alibaba. The team invited 57 farmers to establish a 1,000-mu order-oriented farm, and Alibaba formulated clear standards covering aspects such as sugar content, acidity, appearance, weight, diameter and pesticide residue levels. Every apple that is harvested is then graded at a province-of-origin warehouse featuring intelligent equipment in Xi’an, Shaanxi’s capital city, and sorted appropriately in order to guarantee flavour and quality. 

1,000 soil samples from Luochuan are sent to Sinochem's laboratory in Shandong for testing. [Photo courtesy of Alibaba]

Monitoring soil, extracting data from it, and enhancing it are fundamental to producing higher quality apples with better flavour. The MAP team, therefore, created a plan designed to systematically improve the soil that they are grown on and supplement crop nutrition based on scientific analysis of 1,000 soil samples from Luochuan. All pesticide formulations that have high levels of toxicity, are prone to leaving behind high levels of residue, or are otherwise outdated that had been used in the cultivation process were removed, and digital equipment was installed in the county’s apple orchards in cooperation with Alibaba so that apple cultivation progress can be recorded using blockchain technology in conjunction with daily inspections by technicians in order to curb the use of nonstandard pesticides.

Good results were achieved within a year. Apples reached 14 degrees on the Brix sugar content scale, which is about 1 degree sweeter than average. SGS (formerly Société Générale de Surveillance, French for “General Society of Surveillance”), the world’s leading testing, inspection, and certification company, conducted 508 tests and indicated that “pesticide residues were not detected” in any of them. Seventy percent of the apples that are produced meets commercial standards – a figure 10% to 15% higher than the rate associated with other apples grown in the area – which has boosted net income by RMB3,250 per mu per harvest. At the end of 2020, the digital apples officially entered major national sales channels such as Alibaba’s Hema Supermarket (also known as Freshippo), which is a major grocery retailer integrating aspects of online and offline shopping.

The digital apples are sold in a supermarket. [Photo courtesy of Alibaba]

Farmers can benefit from managing their orchards in accordance with the standards that Alibaba has created and the MAP team’s cultivation system. In 2020, Alibaba purchased more than 3,000 tons of apples from cooperating growers, such as Sang Yanhai. Sang grew apples across 18 mu of land and sold them for a total of RMB300,000, thus achieving over RMB16,000 of output value per mu. He thinks that other farmers who work with Alibaba will be able to achieve similar results and increase their income by RMB3,250 per mu just as he has.