Baoshan Small-Grain Coffee Cultivation Gains Smart Wings

Every morning, at the thousand-mu specialty-coffee demonstration base on Xinjiashan, Luzhang Town, Longyang District, Baoshan, manager Yang Jiangchun habitually logs into the “Yunzhi Nonglian” (Cloud Smart Agri-Chain) platform to check soil temperature, humidity, and pH. Nowadays, his phone and computer have become his “new farm tools.”

Xinjiashan sits in the dry-hot valley of Luzhang Town, the core growing area of Yunnan small-grain coffee. The unique dry-hot-valley climate nurtures the distinctively flavored Baoshan small-grain coffee.

For a long time, however, coffee cultivation relied heavily on manual experience, with crude water-fertilizer control and lagging pest management, lacking intelligent monitoring, early-warning, and full-chain traceability—severely constraining quality improvement and brand development.

“In the past, growing coffee meant betting on the weather, fighting on physical strength, and earning hard-earned money,” Yang said bluntly.

The change began in 2024. To break the bottleneck of high-plateau specialty agriculture and activate new momentum for rural revitalization, China Mobile Yunnan’s Baoshan branch (hereafter “Baoshan Mobile”) joined forces with Baoshan College, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Northwestern Polytechnical University, and other universities to form a R&D team, building the “Yunzhi Nonglian” high-plateau coffee IoT platform. It constructs a “perception–network–data–application” architecture, integrating four functions—farm management, smart water-fertilizer control, pest early-warning, and product traceability—empowering the transformation and upgrading of the traditional coffee industry.

At the Xinjiashan base of Baoshan Lushan Yunchu Agricultural Development Co. and the Lujiangba base of the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences’ Tropical and Subtropical Cash Crops Research Institute, Baoshan Mobile completed a 150-mu pilot, using IoT devices to collect real-time soil moisture, weather, and growth data, enabling remote smart irrigation, precision fertilization, and digital management—a “industry-academia-research-application” integrated demonstration project.

Introducing digital technology into the coffee base rewrote Baoshan small-grain coffee’s cultivation model. The Baoshan Mobile team built a 5G private network across the pilot terraces, deploying soil temperature-humidity and pH sensors, micro-weather stations, and HD surveillance at standardized spacing, collecting core field data around the clock and feeding it back to the “Yunzhi Nonglian” backend in real time—giving the land and field environment a “data portrait.”

“After two years of pilot operation, comprehensive management cost fell 83.43%, fresh-cherry yield per mu rose 21.09%, defect rate dropped 3.34%, and income per mu increased 1,456 yuan,” Yang introduced.

Relying on Baoshan Mobile’s self-developed “Yunzhi Nonglian” digital platform, smart cultivation is fully implemented.

The smart water-fertilizer control system supplies water and nutrients precisely on demand, replacing traditional flood irrigation; an AI pest-identification system accurately screens high-incidence diseases such as coffee rust and anthracnose, pairing with standardized control plans for precise action; a dedicated coffee-cultivation large model intelligently matches cultivation plans with the crop growth cycle; a full-chain traceability system makes the bean’s growth process queryable and traceable, with guaranteed quality.

Now farmers only need to open a mini-program on their phone to remotely control field equipment, view real-time data, and receive early warnings—achieving scientific cultivation without leaving home.

Aerial smart inspection has equipped coffee management with “eyes of a thousand li.” The project introduced fixed-wing plant-protection drones with 4-hour single-flight endurance, covering 20 square kilometers of coffee base; aerial imagery syncs to the backend in real time, and an AI large model intelligently compares against a disease database to precisely catch early hidden pest risks invisible to the naked eye—warning and treating in advance, thoroughly solving the pain points of narrow manual-inspection coverage, low efficiency, and lagging discovery.

“In the past, growing coffee was all trial and error by experience—up before dawn to climb the mountain, helpless when disease struck, guessing at fertilizing and watering,” Yang reflected. “Now with ‘Yunzhi Nonglian,’ I can check field data on my phone at home, the system auto-waters and fertilizes, and drones patrol and protect the mountain for me—saving time and effort, and the beans keep getting better.”

Ding Qishan, application-solutions manager at China Mobile Baoshan, explained that the project’s results have appeared at the Huawei Connect Conference, the International Specialty Coffee Industry Conference, and the Digital China Summit, and have formed a standardized smart-coffee-cultivation solution with a commercialized closed loop, laying a solid foundation for scaled promotion.

“Today, the Xinjiashan smart-coffee pilot has expanded from the initial 150 mu to a thousand-mu demonstration base, radiating to and driving over 1,100 surrounding farming households to transition to digital cultivation,” Ding said. In the future, Baoshan Mobile will extend the mature model to high-plateau specialty crops such as tea, dendrobium, and sugar-apple, supporting rural revitalization.

Yunnan Daily all-media reporter Li Jianguo

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Original: Yunnan Net, “Baoshan: Small-Grain Coffee Cultivation Gains Smart Wings”
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