Agricultural investment of 4.0 should be started from the reality

​High-tech agricultural farm in Xuan Loc District has approached 4.0 technology in production. Photo: Phan Anh

In fact, many farm owners and businesses investing in Vietnam's agricultural sector have approached and applied agriculture 4.0 quite methodically. There are enterprises investing in importing the most modern machinery and equipment in the world to supply the Vietnamese market. Quite a number of enterprises, including both small and medium enterprises, invest methodically and put modern technology into production. Many farms have introduced programmed robots to automatically replace human power, especially in harsh working environments; applying solar energy to self-produce electricity for production in order to reduce the input costs.

In fact, Vietnam's agriculture is capable of approaching the 4.0 revolution. The livestock industry on an industrial scale of dairy cows, pigs, chickens, shrimps, catfish, etc. all have applied automation and closed production chains. Specifically, many livestock farms in the province invest in automatic and modern machinery lines, so it only takes 1-2 workers to control the farm with thousands of pigs, tens of thousands of pigs, hundreds of thousands of birds. Production of vegetables, flowers and fruits also initially applied technologies such as: automation of seedling production; mechanization of tillage; planting.

However, according to experts, investing in modern machinery and equipment requires huge capital. With the reality of production in Vietnam, it is not expected that there will be modern, package 4.0 agricultural production models using automatic machines and robots in production. Depending on actual conditions to apply each part of agriculture 4.0. For example, using a smartphone to control an automatic irrigation system hardly costs much more than an existing automatic irrigation system. Agriculture 4.0 can start from the simplest step as farmers and consumers use smartphones to control automatic watering and fertilizing systems; implement traceability of agricultural products, etc.

Currently, Vietnamese farmers are familiar with using smartphones to find out information every day. Farmers are very "hungry" for information, especially information on new technologies and techniques in production, but lack official sources when learning. Here, the role of the state is to invest in building a source of information from production to information about the market. From a local perspective, provinces need to build information technology centers to connect with farmers, even this is a bridge between farmers and the world agricultural market. Using information technology to transparently manage the agricultural market. Because of this information channel, farmers have problems such as buying the poor quality fertilizer or pesticides, they can respond immediately, widely to the community, no one dares to do the fake business because they will not be able to sell their goods in the market.

This is also the content emphasized by Minister Le Minh Hoan of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development will immediately embark on digital transformation. Because this will be a push to create value for agricultural products and development. Specifically, the value of agricultural products through the e-commerce platform connects all farmers and all consumers; Farmers can post their products on the e-commerce websites and each product in each land has its own brand, origin and is not counterfeited, etc. Revolution 4.0, digital transformation is compared like a wind and the agriculture sector take advantage of that wind to grow.

Phan Anh