State Council Issues 15th Five-Year Plan to Diversify Food Supply and Modernize Facility Agriculture

The "15th Five-Year Plan" for accelerating agricultural and rural modernization issued by the State Council sets out to build a diversified food supply system and calls for deepening the initiative to modernize facility agriculture. By using innovative equipment and facilities to transform agricultural production environments, facility agriculture extends farming into Gobi deserts, saline-alkali land, hills, marine areas and urban buildings, opening a "second front" for food security while safeguarding the 1.8 billion mu red line for farmland. Relying on the abundant solar resources of the Gobi Desert, Gansu Province has built the world's largest contiguous solar greenhouse production area, with desert-based facility agriculture reaching an unprecedented scale.

Facility agriculture is driving the deep integration of frontier technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data and artificial intelligence with agricultural production. From smart greenhouses that automatically regulate water, fertilizer, light, temperature and humidity, to vertical plant factories with soilless cultivation, to intensive farms with precision feeding, it has substantially lifted labor productivity, land output rates and resource utilization. The promotion of facility agriculture has also accelerated coordination across the upstream and downstream industry chain: upstream activities such as seedling breeding, equipment manufacturing and new agricultural inputs, midstream standardized production, and downstream deep processing, cold-chain logistics, branding and marketing, and leisure tourism together form a vast industrial cluster. Hebei Province's facility agriculture secures the "vegetable basket" supply for Beijing and Tianjin, and some areas have raised incomes for tens of thousands of local farmers by developing high-value-added facility fruit and vegetable industries.

At present, China's facility agriculture still faces problems including insufficient overall scale, uneven regional development and varying levels of technology and equipment. On the policy front, land-use policies, fiscal subsidies and supporting financial services are being continuously optimized to secure reasonable space for the development of facility agriculture. On the technology front, an innovation system integrating industry, academia, research and application is being improved, core technology research such as agricultural robots and high-end sensors continues to advance, and the integration of digital technology with agronomy is accelerating. On the industry front, facility agriculture is shifting from concentration on production links toward building a complete modern industrial system, with standardized production and full-process quality and safety traceability systems being gradually improved, and corporate brand building driving the value chain ever higher. On the business entity front, new agricultural operators such as family farms and farmer cooperatives are being cultivated faster, various forms of scaled operations are being explored, and the building of a professional talent team is providing support for the development of facility agriculture.