On November 2th, 218, JD Finance announced that it had changed its name to JD.COM Digital Technology, and officially released the intelligent farming solution for agriculture and animal husbandry in JD.COM. Agriculture and animal husbandry in JD.COM is mainly based on robots, AI, Internet of Things and SaaS, providing intelligent breeding solutions for large and medium-sized pig farms, in which "pig face identification and full chain traceability" are realized.

how did these internet companies raise pigs in the past year? Is pig face recognition a gimmick, does artificial intelligence technology improve production efficiency, and how well do farmers accept "artificial intelligence (AI) to raise pigs"?

Recently, a reporter from The Paper walked into Jilin Jingqishen Organic Agriculture Co., Ltd., a private pig-raising enterprise, to learn the story behind "artificial intelligence (AI) pig-raising".

Since its establishment in 1991, Jilin Jingqishen Organic Agriculture Co., Ltd., a private pig enterprise, has been raising wild black pigs for 28 years, and its products are provided to Wal-Mart Sam Store, Carrefour, AEON, China Resources Ole, JD.COM 7Fresh and so on. After the 4-year-old CEO Sun Yanchun followed his father's footsteps, he had a new calculation in his heart. Besides actively introducing mechanized equipment to improve efficiency, can he introduce more intelligent means to raise pigs and improve management processes?

For example, a difficult problem in raising pigs is how to count the number of thousands of piglets and how to recognize each pig. In the past, the practice was to give pigs ear defects-if they encounter diseases or fertility in pigs, they can be recorded by ear defects.

To the layman, the "missing child" on the ear may be the shape of the pig's ear. An expert can know which batch this pig is and what it has experienced by touching it. However, if the technology of "pig face recognition" can be developed, and all kinds of information such as pig's food intake, body temperature change and exercise can be recorded by intelligent means, and all kinds of information can be recorded in the cloud, and each pig has its own file, will it be more convenient, thus reducing labor costs?

further, from the management process of pig farms, if we can remind employees "when and where the node appears" with the help of machines, can we greatly improve the work efficiency?

"The progress of these technologies is logically simple, but traditional enterprises like us can't do research and development in this area. Therefore, we urgently need this kind of demand, and we need some high-tech enterprises and enterprises with resource integration capabilities to do this. " Sun Yanchun said.

using artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other technologies bred in the field of internet to empower more traditional industries and help them to carry out digital transformation and upgrading to improve operational efficiency, which is called industrial internet in Tencent, industrial digital interconnection in Alibaba and industrial digitalization in JD.COM. In the field of agriculture, technology companies have also begun to flood in.

On June 13th, Li Jialong, deputy general manager of JD.COM Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, was interviewed by the media at Fusong Spirit Breeding Base in Baishan, Jilin Province. He said that the initial development of pig face recognition technology was not a part of the current "intelligent solution for animal husbandry", but for the needs of the insurance team in JD.COM.

"It's a long story. We started pig face recognition because we insured pigs in JD.COM Insurance. There may be a hundred pigs, and 1 of them are insured. (But) No matter who dies, I can apply for insurance, because the insurance company doesn't know which ten of your 1 pigs are insured by me, so even if more than 9 other pigs die, I can apply for insurance. We had an insurance team in JD.COM at that time, and we very much hoped to recognize these ten pigs through a means, so we began to study the technology of pig face recognition in 217. "

as a result, this group of technical team members "plunged" into the pig farm. "Since September 217, because of insurance, we often go to the pig farm to collect data and discover the status quo of China's animal husbandry, so we started to do agriculture and animal husbandry in JD.COM."

China is a big aquaculture country in the world, in which the number of live pigs ranks first in the world, and the pork production accounts for about half of the world. However, there is still a certain gap between the labor productivity, feed conversion rate, sow productivity and production cost of live pig breeding and the international advanced level.

From the perspective of breeding cost, "This is the data in 217. Our cost per kilogram of pork is about 7.82 yuan, while the cost per kilogram of pork in the United States is only 3.97 yuan."