China to invigorate agriculture with information technology

BEIJING - China will further integrate information technology into agriculture in the next five years to increase productivity and efficiency, according to the country's agriculture watchdog.

The government aims to further improve intelligent management in planting, cultivation and machinery and the use of Internet of Things (IoT) will cover 17 percent of the agriculture sector, according to a five-year blueprint released by the Ministry of Agriculture.

Meanwhile, China will continue to support e-commerce growth in agriculture and rural areas, and aims to lift the share of online-retail produce volume in total agricultural output to eight percent by 2020.

The government will build ten pilot provinces, one hundred pilot zones and one thousand pilot bases that will test the integration of information technology with the agriculture industrial chain, according to the blueprint.