2026-03-10
10Today's popular office fruit plants are mostly seasonal, and they need regular watering and sunlight.
Netizens show off seasonal fruit in the office: an orange vase
Strawberries are berries with a high respiration rate and soft, juicy flesh, making them highly susceptible to damage and disease during harvest and transport. Combined with AIintelligently built "plant factories," strawberries can be grown right next to consumers, greatly reducing losses from sorting, transport and storage. Strawberries freshly picked at peak ripeness also taste better, and urban space can be fully used to create "fruit farms" on street corners.
In addition, strawberries have high economic value and the technology is mature +once the model is scaled up, it can support a retail price that covers the "plant factory" cost.
△The 4th “Pinduoduo Agri-Tech Competition” entry: plants grown inside a container with no natural light.
Some teams' "strawberry plant factories" are comparable to an "ultimate brain" in energy design. Not only can space utilization be raised to 200%，and water productivity improved by 300% or more, they can also provide optimal light duration and intensity for strawberries, improving flower bud quality.
Other teams focus on "letting even lazy people enjoy the pleasure of harvest." Their smart planting system builds a digital model from strawberry growth characteristics and, combined with algorithms, automatically adjusts light, temperature, humidity and other conditions in the plant factory in real time.
This "strawberry-growing competition" drew attention at 2025the Smart Agriculture Forum, held for the first time at the World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit. Pinduoduo co-founder Fan Jiezhen used the "Pinduoduo Agri-Tech Competition" as an example to explain the significance of hosting agricultural competitions: "We are willing to turn the company's short-term profits into lasting investment in agricultural technology, talent and the industry chain, sowing a more resilient and abundant digital agriculture future."
The Smart Agriculture Forum is hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Zhejiang University and Pinduoduo, aiming to explore AIthe underlying laws and innovation paths of digital agriculture development in our era, to jointly build a collaborative industrial ecosystem and advance the digital transformation and sustainable development of agriculture and rural areas worldwide.
At the forum, besides announcing the finals progress of the "Pinduoduo Agri-Tech Competition," Pinduoduo also shared the "Global Agri-Innovators Competition" and "Science and Technology Backyard Competition" projects, bringing the "first-hand experience" of China's field-level technological innovation to the international stage and making the discussion on food security and the future of digital agriculture more grounded and instructive.
The wave of artificial intelligence is sweeping the globe, and agriculture - humanity's oldest industry - is undergoing an unprecedented digital transformation.
From "strawberry freedom" to "vegetable-growing freedom"
What is the point of these international smart agriculture forums and agri-tech competitions that Pinduoduo has long organized?
From one strawberry to an industry, from one competition to an ecosystem, for the public what they look forward to may be not only how "strawberry freedom" arrives, but a new agricultural era driven by technology, oriented to efficiency, more sustainable and more diverse.。
The "vegetable-growing freedom" engraved in the Chinese DNA will no longer be limited to rural fields; with the help of technology, it will break the constraints of space and time, making farming more casual, simple and relaxed.And the ultimate goal - "space farming freedom" - is even more worth looking forward to!
△Astronauts harvest and eat lettuce in orbit
With the space plant cultivation device on China's space station (SVCF), Chinese people have already grown vegetables in space, but the future we can imagine goes far beyond this. As Nicola Trendov, senior expert on digital agriculture and innovation at the FAO, said at the Smart Agriculture Forum, "One person can go fast, but a group can go further. Promoting the application of frontier technologies such as agricultural digitalization and artificial intelligence requires collaboration among industry, academia and research."。
Agriculture needs more platforms that support innovative R&D, providing opportunities for aspiring young people to exchange ideas, creating the possibility for technology and change, and accelerating frontier research into the fields where it can truly take root.
