Through coordination by Alibaba's rural special commissioners, Alibaba Cloud recently conducted a training session in Li County focused on leveraging artificial intelligence for regional development. For the first time, AI applications, represented by the company's JVS Claw software, were introduced into the fields and orchards of this northwestern mountain town.
Li County, situated on the northern slopes of the Western Qinling Mountains, boasts altitudes between 1,350 and 1,750 meters. It receives an average annual sunshine of 1,968 hours, with an average yearly temperature of 9.9°C and a frost-free period ranging from 180 to 200 days. Its mild winters and summers, free from extreme temperatures, establish it as a core area of the Longnan apple production zone on the Loess Plateau. Apple cultivation was introduced to the county in 1952. By 1973, it was designated as a production base for apples exported from Gansu Province. In 2008, Li County apples were selected as a recommended fruit for the Beijing Olympics, and in 2011, they received national geographical indication product protection certification. To date, the county's apple cultivation area spans 610,000 mu, with an annual output exceeding 600,000 tons and a total primary industry value reaching 3 billion yuan.
Bai Yalong, an orchardist born in the 1990s, represents the new generation of fruit growers in Li County. Starting from apple sales in 2014, he has engaged in wholesale and e-commerce, and now manages over a thousand mu of orchards. This includes more than 600 mu of traditional standard orchards on the mountains and over 200 mu of modern dwarf dense planting orchards on lower ground, supported by cold storage facilities and seedling bases, creating a fully integrated supply chain from cultivation and planting to storage and sales. "We've had apple trees at home since I was a child, so I know when to pick the fruit and when to apply pesticides," Bai Yalong said. However, he is not content with relying solely on traditional methods and firmly believes in "applying industrial thinking to agriculture." He has introduced drone pesticide spraying, completing the task for 600 mu of mountainous orchard in three days—a job that would traditionally take ten days with manual labor. Water usage per mu has been reduced from 200 liters to 32 liters, while pesticide application has decreased by 20-30%. The orchards on lower ground are fully equipped with drip irrigation and integrated water-fertilization systems, enabling precise irrigation.
Digital technology for orchard management is now being applied in Li County's orchards. During the training, Bai Yalong was among the first to trial the JVS Claw system. He photographed blooming apple blossoms and uploaded the images to the software, receiving an analysis report within seconds: petals, stamens, pistils, and leaf conditions were normal, with approximately 30-40% of the flowers in the initial blooming stage. "This 'Jarvis' is incredibly precise," Bai Yalong remarked. JVS Claw not only assessed the health of the flowers but also automatically correlated local weather data, issuing an alert for potential frost risk between April 18th and 19th. It systematically checked for symptoms frost might cause, such as scorched petals, browned pistils, or blackened ovaries, ultimately concluding that neither flowers nor leaves showed signs of frost damage. Subsequently, a detailed orchard management schedule for the next seven days was automatically generated, specifying daily tasks, required pesticides, and precise mixing ratios. "It doesn't just tell you the condition of the flowers; it lists everything you need to do next, the pests and diseases to watch for, and the exact pesticide formulations," Bai Yalong explained while scrolling through his phone. "It even generates management logs for you, which can be exported as PDFs and sent directly to other orchardists."
Prior to this, Bai Yalong had experimented with other AI products but found them to function more like "advanced search engines"—you input a command and receive a basic summary. "The summarized information always seemed to fall short of what you actually had in mind," he noted. His experience with JVS Claw felt fundamentally different. "This isn't just simple question-and-answer interaction. It has memory; it remembers what you asked yesterday," he said. Bai Yalong refers to this process as "raising the shrimp." In his view, each "shrimp" can be trained to become a specialized assistant—one dedicated to managing orchard tasks, another to creating PPTs and training materials, and a third to planning live streams and marketing strategies. On the evening of the training, he used JVS Claw to design a brand promotion webpage for Li County apples, incorporating elements like the region's 2,700-year history rooted in Qin culture, 70 years of apple cultivation, quality data, and a detailed timeline. "My prompt was very simple—design a webpage introducing Gansu Li County apples, incorporating the local long history," Bai Yalong stated. "It mapped out the entire timeline: the introduction of apples in 1952, becoming an export base in 1973, and being an Olympic fruit in 2008. It even generated an advertising slogan—'Every bite is a gift from nature.'"
Following the training, Bai Yalong promptly recommended JVS Claw to the orchard's technicians and managers. "If there's anything you don't understand going forward, just send a voice message and ask it," he advised. This holds particular significance for the local orchardist community, where those born in the 1970s form the core workforce. Historically, orchard management relied entirely on the experience of veteran farmers and knowledge passed down orally by local experts, with organizing technical training sessions being time-consuming and labor-intensive. Now, "as long as you have a mobile phone and an internet connection, once it's installed, you can ask." During the training session, he had JVS Claw generate a personal IP operation plan for him on the spot—covering account positioning, content strategy, and platform selection—and received a complete proposal within minutes. "I feel this AI is no longer a toy but a genuine productivity tool. Why wouldn't we embrace it?" Bai Yalong said with confidence. In his view, each technological iteration, from search engines to large language models and now to JVS Claw, helps farmers solve problems more efficiently. The key difference is that while past interactions were question-and-answer based, the AI now proactively thinks and acts on the user's behalf.
In Bai Yalong's vision for the future, every orchardist in Li County will have their own AI assistant on their mobile phone, drones will patrol the skies above every orchard, and each apple will carry a traceability code.
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