CHINA TECHNOLOGIES TO PROVIDE ENOUGH FOOD TO OVER 1 BILLION PEOPLE PART 3 of 8

Our third destination is the great plain area in Shandong province.

Location 3: Shouguang, Shandong, China (36°44'15.9"N 118°44'14.7"E)

If we zoom in, we can find millions of reflecting “shiny” houses on the plain area. Try looking around, it is “everywhere”.

What are those? They are greenhouses designed to provide regulated and controlled conditions such as temperatures and humidity for vegetables and fruits to grow.

In the greenhouse, you can grow all kinds of different vegetables and fruits several times per year regardless of the time of the year. That means you can get several times more vegetable and fruit yield compared to a normal field.

For example, you need at least 52 days to grow lettuce from seeds until you can harvest them in a greenhouse. That means you can grow 7 times each year. That is 7x efficiency.

Therefore greenhouses can significantly improve agriculture output in a limited space, which sounds perfect to the Chinese. Eager for promotion, local Chinese government officials in Northern China have therefore forced their constituency —the local farmers to install greenhouses with loans from the “Chinese Rural Cooperative Bank”.

What’s worse, they also forced them to install IoT based surveillance system in their greenhouses. Farmers are forced to be taught in a “reeducation camp” to use their mobile phones to monitor the status in the greenhouse including CO2, light strength, soil temperature, etc.

As a result, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation, the vegetable and fruit production and consumption of China is around 700 million tonnes, which is 40% of the world consumption. Compared to India (180 million), China achieved a 3.8x amount of vegetable and fruit production, despite the fact that most of the population in India are claimed to be vegetarians, despite the fact that the arable land in China is less than India. The secret key is the greenhouse.

Thanks to the greenhouses, the Chinese can enjoy much cheaper and much more variety of vegetables than any other country in the world all year around. You can check from the Wikipedia, basically, China tops the chart in almost every kind of non-tropical vegetable production, far outpacing the second place. There are vegetables that are not ranked because they are only specific to East Asia, such as the “garlic chives” (韭菜).

Similarly, for fruit production, China tops the global chart in almost every kind of non-tropical fruit production, far outpacing the second place as well.

I was once been pranked and called as “racist” when I invited a black friend for a summer BBQ with lots of watermelons. I proved my innocent by showing him these statistics:

In Japan, a watermelon typically costs 2000 yen ($18) and in China, you can afford a much larger watermelon just in 10RMB ($1.5). And watermelon in China is sweeter if it is grown in Xinjiang. If you love watermelons or any other melons, come to China, especially Kumul in Xinjiang.