BEIJING, May 6 -- "Even if we were cut off from the outside by heavy snow, we can still have green vegetables every day." said Zhao Duofeng, commander of a border defense company under the Xinjiang Military Command, Western Theater Command of the PLA. The company, stationed in the hinterland of the karakoram Mountains with an altitude of 5,170 meters, has no road traffic to the outside world for six months each year due to heavy snow. Now, the company has built a "vegetable factory" supported by soil-free cultivation and photoelectric technologies to ensure stable vegetable output.
To solve the difficult problem of planting vegetables in harsh plateau environment, in recent years, the military logistics and energy bureau of the Logistics Support Department under the Central Military Commission (CMC) cooperated with civil scientific institutes in developing vegetable planting technologies for plateau areas and guided the construction of "vegetable factory" at all the border defense units of the PLA stationed at the plateau areas at an elevation of 3,000 meters and above.
The "vegetable factory" has made the cultivation of vegetables during the winter months possible in the camps of border defense companies stationed at and above elevation of 3,000 meters. In the "vegetable factory", the greenhouses are equipped with artificial lights as the supplement to natural light source and high-performance heating insulation equipment. The temperature, humidity, lighting, carbon dioxide concentration in the greenhouses are monitored by a smart system. Basing on those data, the smart system is also able to make refined nutrition formulas for the plants.
Apart from the "vegetable factory", the constant temperature vegetable storage cellar has made storing fresh vegetables no longer a headache for the frontier defense troops stationed in plateau areas. New energy storage materials and photovoltaic energy supply systems can ensure the temperature in the vegetable storage cellar to maintain constant even without power supply.