Plant Factory

Pinduoduo turned its agricultural innovation contest into a physical engineering challenge: four finalist teams each built a 50-square-meter (10x5x4 m) smart plant factory from scratch, growing only domestic strawberry varieties with fully domestic technology and requiring unattended remote autonomous control, judged on berry quality and sustainability. The 'Berry Cube' team, combining Shanghai Jiao Tong University with engineering firm Jiqing Technology and strawberry grower Jiaxing Jiamei, found that parameterizing light, temperature, humidity, fertigation and CO2 does not guarantee good strawberries, as biological systems resist standardization.