Technology Empowers Spring Ploughing, Wisdom Lights Up the Fields — Minqin County Draws a New Picture of Modern Spring Ploughing with Science and Technology

As Awakening of Insects approaches, spring ploughing is in full swing. Known as the "Hometown of Chinese Pepino Melon" and the largest protected pepino melon production base in northwest China, Minqin County, Wuwei City, Gansu Province, witnesses a strong wave of technology in its spring ploughing. Intelligent seedling raising, digital field management and precise services work together, with smart agriculture injecting strong new momentum into the county’s annual grain harvest and high-quality development of characteristic industries, making spring ploughing in this Gobi oasis more efficient and promising.

Entering Minqin’s Pepino Melon Virus-Free Seedling Raising Center, a modern atmosphere greets visitors. Inside the column-free all-steel frame greenhouses, intelligent equipment such as automatic seeders, germination chambers, plug cleaning machines and grafting production lines operate efficiently. The entire process from substrate treatment, sowing and germination to grafting healing and strong seedling cultivation is fully streamlined, ensuring seedling quality and greatly improving seedling raising efficiency. Relying on virus-free seedling technology, the county is breaking the bottleneck in the intensive and high-quality development of the pepino melon industry from the source. Large-scale and standardized seedling raising lays a solid foundation for the development of characteristic industries, and the high-quality seedlings cultivated by the center now not only meet local planting needs but also are sold to surrounding areas.

Science and technology escort spring ploughing. In the fields of Minqin, technical services are always available, serving as an important support for spring ploughing and sowing preparation. At the solar greenhouse base in Zhongcha Village, Dongba Town, agricultural technicians go deep into the greenhouses, holding soil detectors to carefully check soil conditions and conduct "diagnoses" on the soil. Based on the fertility differences of different plots, they tailor scientific fertilization "prescriptions" for farmers, answer various fertilization questions on site, and explain key points such as nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratio and the combination of organic and inorganic fertilizers in detail. Their notebooks are filled with soil "physical examination reports" and corresponding "adjustment plans" for each greenhouse, providing professional services to safeguard farmers’ spring ploughing.

Nowadays, agricultural technicians issuing "prescriptions" and farmers purchasing fertilizers and seeds based on these "prescriptions" have become a new highlight of spring ploughing preparation in Minqin. This not only avoids blind fertilization and waste of agricultural materials but also accurately meets crop growth needs, laying the foundation for high yield and increased income.

To meet the technical needs of this year’s spring ploughing, Minqin’s agricultural department has continuously strengthened the construction of agricultural technical service teams, coordinating innovation teams, field schools and on-the-job experts to go deep into the frontline of production, solving production problems such as fertilization, irrigation and seedling raising on a one-to-one basis. By implementing a three-dimensional training model of "theoretical lectures + field classes + online live broadcasts", it combines centralized explanations, practical demonstrations and online Q&A, and regularly carries out follow-up service training for high-quality farmers, truly breaking through the "last mile" of science and technology promotion services and enabling agricultural technical talents to provide precise support for spring ploughing.

At the same time, in line with the development trend of modern agriculture and based on local resource endowments, Minqin is accelerating the digital, intelligent and unmanned transformation of agriculture, vigorously promoting the application of smart farmland, precision planting and intelligent equipment, and promoting the transformation of agricultural production from extensive management to intensive development and from scattered planting to large-scale operation. Since the Start of Spring, the whole county has seized the farming season, prepared sufficient agricultural materials, strengthened services and optimized guarantees. Mechanical strength and digital technology work in synergy and empower each other. Technologies such as shallow buried drip irrigation and intelligent monitoring are widely used, enabling spring ploughing to achieve "acceleration" with technological support and realize multiple benefits of water conservation, yield increase and quality improvement.

Minqin is continuously improving digital infrastructure such as agricultural Internet of Things and big data platforms. Relying on cloud technology and big data, it deepens the integration of online and offline marketing, actively develops new formats such as shared agriculture and live-streaming e-commerce, and promotes the all-round integration of digital technology into the whole process of spring ploughing preparation, production management and market sales, letting the light of science and technology illuminate the path of modern agricultural development. At present, the planting area of pepino melon in Minqin has exceeded 31,200 mu, with an annual output value of 980 million yuan, becoming a "get-rich golden fruit" for local rural revitalization.

Today, the vast fields of Minqin are deeply empowered by modern information technology, full of vitality everywhere. A modern spring ploughing picture integrating good varieties, good methods and good farmland, and matching agricultural machinery, agronomy and farmers is being quickly painted on this land, laying a solid foundation for the annual agricultural harvest, industrial prosperity and farmers’ income increase.