As the food crisis emerges, how can technology help agriculture? As geopolitical risks increase, how to increase food self-sufficiency and avoid food shortages causing livelihood problems has become an important consideration for national security. At present, Taiwan's food self-sufficiency rate is about 30%, farmland is fallow, and agricultural GDP accounts for less than 2%. What challenges are Taiwan's agriculture and food security facing? With the rise of the concept of sustainability, the rise of new technologies such as the Internet of Things, sensing devices, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing can provide new solutions for agriculture? According to Yang Xuchen, CEO of the Lugong Agricultural Production and Marketing Foundation, the current agriculture is facing many challenges, including climate change leading to global warming, changes in rainfall patterns, species, diseases and insect pests and other natural environmental factors that are different from the old farming experience; and the aging population Socio-economic structural factors such as labor shortage and labor shortage are bound to have an impact on agricultural productivity. On the other hand, there has been a long-standing problem of production and marketing. Farmers rush to grow crops that are currently selling well, and various agricultural subsidies cannot effectively "attract" farmers to follow government policies. Most farmers insist on taking a gamble, but they often encounter abundant harvests, the oversupply of production makes them unable to sell, and the dilemma of relying on the government to purchase them is repeated again and again. On the other hand, under the liberalization of trade, the import of low-priced agricultural products from other countries also directly affects the development of Taiwan's agricultural products. In addition to the improvement of policies and systems, the help of agricultural science and technology can also improve the ability of Taiwan's agriculture to respond to the food crisis. For example, through technological improvement, we can plant cash crops suitable for Taiwan's climate and reduce our dependence on foreign wheat. Can agricultural problems be solved using technological solutions? Although the equipment and technology related to smart agriculture have been developed for many years, there are still difficulties in actual promotion. First, the existing technology may not meet the actual needs of the site; second, the cost of related equipment is relatively high, and the difficulty of investment must be solved. Recently, the Rugong Agricultural Production and Marketing Foundation has actively assisted the Chiayi County Government in building a "cross-domain integration platform for smart agriculture" and provided relevant information and services to farmers in need in the form of an advisory group. It is not blindly giving money and subsidies, but actually understanding the needs of farmers and matching suitable resources, including the introduction or assistance of basic equipment. "Currently Taiwan's promotion of smart agriculture, most of it still stays in the setting of environmental equipment such as sensors, and there are still very few applications that can collect complete data and import AI," Yang Xuchen said. If agriculture wants to import AI, it needs Overcoming many difficulties, because crops have a long growth cycle, it is not easy to accumulate a large amount of data in a short period of time, and the labeling of data is highly dependent on agricultural experts with professional knowledge
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