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Transformed with smart techniques, the lettuce industry keep facing to new market

2025-04-16

Lettuce in nowadays is one of the main agricultural export product in Taiwan, although the production of lettuce was not common before 2002. Due to the weather condition in central Taiwan during winter season is favorable for lettuce, this industry grows vividly during the past 20 years. However, the lettuce is facing different aspects of challenge of which restrict the development. The first challenge is the shortage and aging of labor force that requires field machine to reduce the labor demand. Due to the customer’s demand on product accreditation, it need more labor inputs for field records. Moreover, the increase of costs, plant disease and pest management, the saturation of export market, post-harvest and cold chain techniques is close related to the development of industry. In views of this, the smart production system is introduce to enhance the lettuce industry. The establishment of ridge making and fertilization sync technique saves the fertilizer application in 50% and reduce the labor cost than the traditional transplanting. The development lettuce growth model served as foundation for smart production system to increase the accuracy of field management. In terms of pest monitoring, we develop automatic pest trap monitoring instrument to reduce labor monitoring and improve the accuracy of pest population dynamic monitoring. This monitoring provides basis for accurate pest control to reduce the pesticide abuse. The iPLANT system, information system for accreditation information collection, integrates field operation, irrigation channel, soil information and pest warning, helps industry to increase the integrity of production history and reduce the labor requirement of paper work for 50%. The post-harvest cold chain transportation technique for middle-east area is complete to overcome the transportation restriction. In 2021, the container was successfully sent to middle-east market. This successful opens new opportunity to overcome the saturation of existing export market. Under the close cooperation of public and private sector, the lettuce industry is featured with smart technology step by step to transform into knowledge intensive industry from labor intense industry.

Title

Introduction

The simulation model on lettuce yield predition

 The lettuce yield prediction model was providing for the demo site as support system in field management. It requires the the historical temperature and solar radiation as standard weather reocrd and recalculate the simulation results when observed temperture and solar radiation updated after transplanting. This model has been validated for 2 year and supplied for the industry.

The smart production system in lettuce industry

 Althoght iceberg lettuce is major vegetable for export, the field mangemen are depends on human labor. In order to reduce the labor loading, we esbalished in furrow fertilization technique to save the fertilizer and labor cost in 4500-9000 per hectare, and introduce the automatic transplanting machine that farmers can transplant more than 24000 plants per day without the risk of damage from bend over during field transplanting.

Accreditation Support System iPLANT

 The accreditation support system contains PC and app version was introduced to the letttuce industry to reduce the loading of field record. It integrated with GIS based system for farmland risk analysis and e-form for lettuce industy. This system was supplied to the industry for easy note and fast analysis.

Automatic Noctuidae Pest Track and Warning System

 The infra red sensing and counting sensor were incorporated with the traditional monitoring track to form this automatic pest track. It automatically counting the pest number and sending the monitoring results to the cloud system through wireless. After the analysis of real time pest population density, the warning was pushing to the farmer's according to the risk level. With this automatic monitoring and warning release, it is helpful to remind the farmers on pest control in early stage. This techniques are benefit on avoiding pest hazardous expention and achieving the goal of reducing agricultural hazardous.

Paramiterization of Process Based Model STIC on Iceberg Lettuce

 In order to supply product on time to save the lost from early or late production to achieve produce-to-order. It is important to establish accurate havest date and yield prediction technique. The process based model STICS was selected as potential decision support system (DSS) in lettce industry. The crop coefficienty of local variety were paramiterized from the field observed results and empirical equations were eatablished for head fresh weight calculation. The coefficient of determination (R2) between simulated and observed head weight was more than 0.9. This results indicates the potential of STICS model in iceberg lettuce in Taiwan. The model was incorporated into iPLANT systtem for simulating the ipact of weather and field mangement on crop yield.

Establishing emerging technology of lettuce long term cold chain export for new market

 Facing with the problem of saling limitaion of export country , we actively strengthened the cold chain managment technology after harvesting, owing to extend the shelf life of lettuce, and established environmental control parameters for long-distance transportation maintain the quality before shelf-saling. In 2020-21, we completed the cold chain environmental control technology, from field to precooling before transporation with extending the shelf life. In order to export iceberg lettuce to the Middle East market with effecitive ambient environmental cold chain operation mode for lettuce export.
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