At a State Council Information Office press conference today for the "15th Five-Year Plan Initial Steps" series, officials outlined progress on securing the nation's "granary" and ensuring food security. According to the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration, China's comprehensive grain production capacity has steadily improved in recent years, with different regions able to offset each other's harvest shortfalls, giving the country a strong production stability. In 2025, China's annual grain output reached 715 million tons, with per-capita grain availability exceeding 500 kilograms, above the global average.
On the reserve side, during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, the scale and structure of grain reserves were continuously optimized, with a more rational layout and steadily enhanced safeguarding capabilities. The national grain inventory-to-consumption ratio remains far above the international food security warning line of 17%-18%. If abnormal market fluctuations occur, reserve storage can be deployed to regulate supply and demand and stabilize the grain market. For the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, China aims to build four types of grain depots: safe, smart, green, and clean, to raise the standard of grain management and storage.
In developing smart depots and advancing "AI plus grain reserve" initiatives, Zhejiang, leveraging its digital economy advantages, has taken the lead in launching related pilot programs, with smart granaries rapidly becoming a tangible reality. The transformation begins at the first quality inspection checkpoint when grain enters the warehouse. At Wenzhou Panqiao Granary, rows of towering white silo structures, each dozens of meters high, stand out prominently. A sampling rod over six meters long, operated remotely by staff, precisely pierces into grain transport trucks to extract samples from multiple points, completing the process in under two minutes.
The samples are immediately sent to an integrated automatic grain quality testing device, which simultaneously checks indicators such as husking rate, moisture, impurities, and heavy metal content, producing results in about ten minutes. "In the past, workers had to manually sample each sack with a probe; now the robotic arm extends and samples multiple points at once, both faster and more accurately," said Jin Weibo, deputy director of the Panqiao Granary. The integrated quality sampling and inspection application promoted by the Zhejiang Provincial Food and Strategic Reserves Administration has tripled inspection efficiency upon intake, and with equipment like hydraulic plate turners, the entire intake process can be completed in 30 minutes.
After grain enters storage, the granary's "senses" and "brain" are also being upgraded. Previously, the transfer and leveling of grain were the most labor-intensive "manual jobs," but the unmanned transport vehicles at Hangzhou Grain Depot of Zhejiang Grain Reserve Group have changed that scenario. These "smart vehicles," using multi-radar and visual fusion technology, can automatically plan routes, precisely dock with various grain handling machines, and autonomously complete the full cycle of loading, transporting, weighing, and unloading, with all data recorded for full traceability.
Behind this lies a "cloud-edge-device" three-tier brain architecture: the vehicle end handles real-time environment perception, autonomous decision-making, and precise execution; the edge end manages task dispatch and vehicle scheduling; and the cloud end fuses data to execute optimal commands, forming an efficient automated transfer logistics system. This technology is already being rolled out in Wuhan, Wuxi, and Chongqing.
If intelligent equipment serves as the granary's "strong limbs," then digital platforms and smart sensing systems act as the "smart brain" and "acute senses," giving the granary the ability to "know hot from cold" and issue proactive warnings. At Hangzhou Renhe Granary, a massive electronic display has become the "command center" for the entire facility. On the smart granary integrated information management platform built with 3D visualization, various warehouse types such as flat stores and shallow silos are clearly delineated, with basic grain storage information managed in a ledger and visualized manner. Key indicators like temperature, humidity, pests, and gas are monitored in real time, presenting the full grain condition across the entire depot on one screen.
This "smart brain" enables multi-dimensional sensing of stored grain conditions, centralized management of operational data, intelligent scheduling of warehouse operations, and real-time monitoring of equipment status, pushing storage management rapidly toward a "paperless" and "intelligent" future. A deeper change is occurring at the foundational logic of grain management. Wenzhou, aligning with Zhejiang's "future granary" goals, has innovatively built five systems for model, green, unmanned, digital-intelligent, and clean granaries. It has created a digital twin platform with inventory accuracy exceeding 99%, while the "3+1 smart management" system connects nearly 1,900 video feeds across 96 granaries in the city, with AI automatically warning of safety hazards and achieving a 100% rectification closure rate.
Advancing deep AI enablement, Zhejiang is building a smart service platform for reserve business, where "Grain Secretary," "Grain Assistant," and "Grain Doctor" will leverage large models to serve reserve management, farmer-benefit services, and technical support in key scenarios.
Comments