In the golden autumn season, journalists visited the summer cultivation zone of the Jixing Smart Agriculture Industrial Park in Bayan Hot Town's Bayan Hod GCC, Alxa Left Banner. Inside a 28,000-square-meter intelligent climate-controlled greenhouse, tomato vines towering over seven meters high were adorned with clusters of crimson fruit resembling rubies. Workers on mobile platforms skillfully harvested the produce before moving to sorting, quality inspection, weighing, and packaging stations. By evening, this batch of fresh tomatoes would be loaded onto refrigerated trucks bound for supermarket shelves in Beijing and Shanghai.
Since the summer cultivation zone's tomato seedlings were transplanted in May and harvesting began in July, both production volume and sales have been impressive, with the picking season extending through the end of October, according to Zhang Youjun, the park's manager. The industrial park represents a total investment of 100 million yuan, designed as a circular economy model integrating smart agriculture, comprehensive energy, and cultural tourism with industry-academia-research collaboration. The facility encompasses two growing areas: a 42-mu summer zone and a 75-mu winter zone.
The operational summer zone serves as the project's pioneering model, specifically addressing the local vegetable industry's challenges of small scale, outdated technology, underdeveloped seedling cultivation, and limited market integration, Zhang explained. Rather than traditional soil cultivation, the park employs coconut coir substrate and a fully automated smart cultivation management system. Real-time monitoring regulates temperature, humidity, light, and crop growth conditions while automatically adjusting water and nutrient supply, ventilation, and supplemental lighting. This intelligent irrigation and precision fertilization approach has achieved unprecedented levels of unmanned and refined operations.
The system has reduced human error while overcoming the region's natural constraints of high temperatures, drought, and saline-alkaline soil, resulting in tomatoes with higher sweetness, uniform shape, and consistent quality. Miaqiangqiang, the cultivation department manager, noted that conventional tomato cultivation typically maintains two vines per plant with eight fruit clusters each, whereas the smart cultivation model supports three to four vines, each bearing up to twenty clusters. Planting density and yield have increased 1.5-fold and 5-fold respectively compared to traditional methods, with premium fruit quality exceeding 80 percent while production costs have fallen by 20 percent and labor management expenses by 40 percent.
The intelligently cultivated tomatoes have become particularly popular in Beijing and Shanghai, with daily shipments ranging from 2 to 4 tons, and top-grade fruit commanding prices above 20 yuan per kilogram, Miaqiangqiang added. Beyond achieving dual improvements in yield and quality, the park's smart greenhouse operations have created new employment opportunities for local villagers. Sarinhua, a 42-year-old resident of Bayan Hod GCC who previously worked as a dishwasher at a town restaurant facing long commutes and low pay, became one of the first employees when the summer zone launched, securing stable work close to home.
Previously, I had to take odd jobs everywhere, but now working at the park brings in over 5,000 yuan monthly along with insurance coverage; it's truly wonderful, she said with a smile. Currently, more than thirty local villagers have been recruited as industrial workers, achieving stable income growth without leaving their hometowns. The industrial park project has significantly strengthened the vegetable basket supply capacity for Bayan Hot Town and surrounding areas while simultaneously advancing the region's smart greenhouse cultivation and leisure agriculture sectors, said Zhao Defeng, vice chairman of Alxa Left Banner's Political Consultative Conference and party secretary of Bayan Hot Town.
Beyond stable operations and enhanced production, the park continues to pursue localization, trial cultivation, and promotion of premium fruit and vegetable varieties. Through collaborative breeding and seedling laboratories with university agricultural programs, research is underway on agricultural cultivation intelligence and agricultural embodied robots, realizing practical artificial intelligence applications in farming with the goal of establishing a zero-carbon, intelligent, modern agricultural demonstration base.
Zhang Youjun outlined plans to perfect the full industrial chain operation system, address industry shortcomings, and amplify distinctive advantages, promoting standardized production, scaled cultivation, market-oriented operations, diversified business formats, and sustainable returns. The park will gradually introduce intelligent robots and environmental smart control systems, advancing the transformation from traditional smart greenhouses toward fully AI-automated unmanned farms.
Reporter's Notes: The Gobi landscapes of Alxa have long been constrained by drought and saline soils, historically limiting fruit and vegetable cultivation. Today, through smart agriculture technology, the region has broken free from natural limitations, producing high-quality tomatoes that travel over a thousand kilometers to reach consumers in Beijing and Shanghai. Technology has enabled remarkable leaps in both crop yield and quality while delivering tangible benefits to local farmers and herders. Villagers now work as industrial workers close to home, leaving behind the instability of odd jobs for steady income and social security. These small tomatoes bear witness to the agricultural transformation of this desert camel town, as the industrial park not only secures the local vegetable basket but also deepens industry-academia-research innovation, steadily progressing toward a fully AI-driven unmanned farm where smart agriculture empowers rural revitalization.