China's first "digital pasture" will be built in Ordos’s Hangjin Banner, North China's Inner Mongolia. The pasture is marked by a strategic cooperation agreement reached among the government of Hangjin Banner, Beijing Micro-Electronics Technology Institute (772th institute) of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation’s Ninth Research Institute, and Shanghai InfoTM Micro-Electronics Co (InfoTM).

Hangjin Banner will provide funds and venues for the project, while the agreement’s other parties, the 772th institute and InfoTM, will provide professionals and technological support.

Through information technologies such as BDS (Beidou Navigation Satellite System) location services, BDS data delivery and unmanned aerial vehicles, the project could monitor herds in depopulated zones. At the project’s completion, herd locations will be available to pasture owners through smart phones or the Internet at anytime anywhere. Moreover, unmanned aerial vehicles can supervise the herds.

Meanwhile, the depopulated zone’s natural ecological environment or rare wild animals will be under the supervision of this “digital pasture” in order to promote the sustainable development of such a zone.

The project is a significant action in pushing forward the construction of a demonstration base on agriculture and animal farming. Its first phrase, also its demonstration project, is planned to finish before the first season of 2015. A trial operation will take place in the Kubuqi Desert.

Hangjin Banner proposed construction of a mobile doctoral work station on the foundation of the digital pasture and cultivation of a batch of high-level information professionals.

Edited by Michael Thai