Part of the smart production line involving washing, drying, and sorting oranges in Zigui county, Yichang in Central China's Hubei Province Photo: Chen Tao/GT

When you place an order on popular e-commerce platforms, farmers in Zigui county, Yichang, Central China's Hubei Province, swiftly pick navel oranges from the trees in their orchards and use drones to transport them to a nearby highway collection point.

The oranges are then sent to a smart logistics warehouse in Zigui, where fully automated robotic arms unload them and transfer them to conveyor belts. Within this facility, smart production lines wash, dry, and sort the oranges using an artificial intelligence (AI) detection system. This system not only categorizes oranges based on their sizes but also measures the sugar and water content. 

This sounds like a futuristic industry but it is now a daily life for Zigui orange farmers. It's worth noting that Zigui was officially lifted out of poverty as recently as in April 2019. In five years, advanced technologies have helped the county realize a digital transition - and transformation as well - and set up modern orange industrial chains.

Zigui, a county located on the banks of the Yangtze River and renowned as the "hometown of Chinese navel oranges," boasts a rich history of orange cultivation spanning over 2,000 years. Today, its annual orange output stands at an impressive 700,000 tons, thanks to cutting-edge agricultural technologies, which have helped streamline the planting, transporting, and sorting of oranges, the Global Times learned from Zigui county government.

As of the end of 2023, Zigui's output value of navel oranges reached 120 million yuan ($16.6 million), with per capita sales income of navel oranges exceeding 40,000 yuan, according to the Zigui county government.

Hometown opportunities 

"In just one minute, the drone can take 50 to 60 kilograms of navel oranges from the mountaintop to the truck parked at the foot of the mountain," drone operator Liu Yang, who describes himself as a "new farmer," told the Global Times right beside the truck that was ready to transport the oranges in Zigui's Pengjiapo village.

The journey used to take at least 40 minutes in a traditional way - purely human labor climbing down the steep slope carrying a heavy basket, Liu said.

"It still feels unreal for everyone, even though I operated the drone and the farmers have experienced drone services themselves. Every time I fly the drone, many farmers, especially elderly people, are attracted, and they try hard to figure out how the machine can fly and why it can transport heavy cargo," said Liu.

Indeed, drone transporting oranges has become a common sight for farmers in Pengjiapo village, where nearly 2,000 out of the total 2,600 villagers are engaged in the navel orange cultivation industry.

Liu, born in 1988, used to be a truck driver in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, which is about 1,200 kilometers away from Pengjiapo. Having seen the opportunities provided by technologies, he came back to the village, which is his wife's hometown, in 2021.

Li Qiang, chief of the Pengjiapo village Party committee, told the Global Times that new technologies have helped the countryside develop, which provided more opportunities that have drawn young people back from big cities.

Currently, Pengjiapo village has seven drones used for orange transportation. The village plans to hold drone operation training courses in July to allow more people to learn these skills, according to Li.

"Young people return home for two major jobs: The first is to provide drone services that help the villagers transport navel oranges. The second is to help the village sell navel oranges through e-commerce platforms," Li said.

Wang Enjie, 33, was among the young people choosing to return from big cities to help build the e-commerce industry in Zigui. After quitting his job at a laptop manufacturing company in Shanghai, Wang returned to Zigui in 2016 and is now the general manager of Zigui County Weichu Cloud Warehouse Logistics Service Co and secretary-general of Zigui's e-commerce association.

"About 200 tons of navel oranges are processed at our plant. We have set up business connections with more than 300 farmers. Now, eight e-commerce enterprises with annual sales surpassing 20 million yuan are enjoying our intelligent factory services," Wang told the Global Times at Weichu's processing factory in Zigui.

Today's future 

At the factory, robotic arms and AI-empowered electronic recognition systems were busy handling, cleaning, screening and sorting the navel oranges, the Global Times observed during a visit. 

"Sorting used to be a labor-intensive work requiring years-long experience to judge the sugar and water content of navel oranges. It's a different picture now. An electronic system is quick enough to sort about 600 oranges, or 150 kilograms, in one minute," Wang said.

By the end of 2024, construction of Weichu's new logistics center, covering an area of 26,000 square meters, will be completed. It is located beside the current processing plant.

Using a combination of smart technologies and e-commerce platforms, Zigui has become one of the top 30 counties in the national citrus industry. It is now home to more than 2,600 e-commerce enterprises and more than 8,100 online stores, with annual sales of more than 3.5 billion yuan, supporting over 60,000 e-commerce-related jobs.

Zigui county has boosted the construction of smart orchards in order to promote the application of digital sorting equipment, drones, integrated water and fertilizer machine and other new equipment for agriculture. 

A similar smart transition is also unfolding at Sunjiagang village in Yuanan county, which is about 120 kilometers away from Zigui.

"Equipped with cloud technology provided by Baidu AI Cloud and Huawei Cloud, the smart greenhouse can automatically detect the humidity, temperature and nutrition of crops, and automatically water and supplement fertilizer as required," Sun Xiaohua, head of Sunjiagang Ecological Garden, told the Global Times.

The smart greenhouses are also equipped with electronic detection systems that can identify insects and spray measured quantities of pesticides, which greatly reduces the burden on farmers, Sun noted.

Sun also shared his experience of remotely opening the sunshades of his smart greenhouses using a mobile app installed on his phone. What's remarkable? He executed the operation while on a business trip in Africa.