Advanced Facilities Efficient ProductionWumart Group is an online and offline retail group whose business mainly involves retail trade, e-commerce, Internet/Internet of Things technology, logistics and transportation and other formats. In recent years, Wumart Group has extended its business layout upwards and established a plant factory as an agricultural direct mining base.
It is reported that the Wumart Plant Factory is located in the agricultural base of Zhuozhou City, Hebei Province. The plant factory was completed in April last year. The actual use area of the factory is 180 square meters, and it is divided into 5 functional areas, of which the vegetable cultivation room is 96 square meters, and 41 sets of planting modules are arranged. Each set of tripods has 6 layers, and the effective planting area of each layer is 6.48 square meters.
This plant factory mainly cultivates green leafy vegetables such as lettuce and cabbage. Through high-tech hydroponics technology and professional purple LED plant growth lights, the vegetables grow faster and better, and the closed environment is almost unaffected by external climatic conditions.
According to Lei You, the planting technical supervisor of Wumart Agricultural Company, under the background of consumption upgrading, more and more consumers pay more attention to food quality. The next step is "ordering vegetables" and "high-end customization" will become the development goals of plant factories. Plant Factory is still in the closed beta stage.
In fact, the technology of large-scale and refined planting factories in the Netherlands, Japan and other countries is relatively mature, and many of them are gradually entering the stage of mass production and regular supply. In China, many companies have begun to introduce "plant factories" related technologies to test planting. However, the plant factory also has the disadvantage, that is, the high cost.
The vegetables of Wumart Plant Factory are about RMB 70 for 0.5 kg, and the market acceptance capacity is not so high at present. Reducing the cost of electricity, thereby reducing operating costs, has become an urgent problem to be solved in the process of commercialization of plant factories.
According to Lei You, "intelligent manufacturing" of vegetables in extremely cold or extremely hot areas is a unique application scenario for plant factories. In Tibet, Xinjiang and other places, due to environmental factors, it is not suitable to grow vegetables, and transportation conditions are also limited. Plant factories can solve people's most basic needs for vegetables and vitamins. In places where wind and solar energy are abundant, the cost of electricity will also drop significantly.