Protected Agriculture: Fueling the Silent Agricultural Revolution & Its Upcoming Trends

A silent agricultural revolution is quietly unfolding worldwide—are you ready? When we talk about agriculture, what image comes to mind? Is it the traditional farming of "facing the loess and turning one's back to the sky," or the "sci-fi scene" of drones pollinating automatically and robots picking precisely in modern greenhouses? In fact, global agriculture is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. As a key form of modern agriculture, protected agriculture is shifting from an "option" to a "necessity," playing an increasingly important role in global food security, sustainable resource utilization, and efficient agricultural production.

Why is protected agriculture so crucial? The global population has exceeded 8 billion and will approach 10 billion by 2050. Meanwhile, arable land resources continue to decrease due to urbanization, desertification, salinization, and other factors. Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations shows that approximately 33% of the world's soil is currently degraded, with the annual loss of arable land equivalent to the size of Croatia. By regulating environmental factors through artificial means, protected agriculture breaks free from over-reliance on natural conditions, driving a revolutionary shift in agricultural production from "relying on the weather for harvest" to "manual regulation." Countries like the Netherlands, Japan, and Israel have proven that protected agriculture can increase land productivity by 5-10 times and water use efficiency by 3-5 times.

Over the next 5-10 years, protected agriculture will see three core development trends:

Modernization as the cornerstone：In the next 5 years, traditional facilities will be phased out at an accelerated pace, and new covering materials, environmental control equipment, and new energy technologies will be widely adopted. Within 10 years, fully enclosed "climate banks" may become standard equipment, capable of precisely regulating factors such as temperature, light, water, air, and fertilizers according to crop needs.

Scale as the key to cost reduction：The "small, scattered, and fragmented" models of protected agriculture will gradually be eliminated. Large agricultural enterprises will form scale advantages through mergers and acquisitions. Data shows that the economic benefits of protected agriculture bases over 100 mu (a Chinese land measurement unit, approximately 6.67 hectares) are more than 30% higher than those of small-scale operations.

Clustering as the path to efficiency improvement：In the future, protected agriculture will form integrated clusters covering "production-processing-logistics-sales," reducing intermediate links and enhancing overall efficiency. The Westland region in the Netherlands has already formed the world's most intensive greenhouse cluster, achieving high-efficiency development by sharing technologies, talents, and market resources—a model worth learning from.