Ten years ago, Tian Shuxian sat in an office in Hangzhou. Today, she tests sensors in her fields and studies artificial intelligence at Renmin University of China.

As a child in Chibi, Hubei Province, Tian often watched her parents working in the fields from dawn to dusk, earning only a modest income. She later pursued higher education, earning a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology and a master’s degree in fisheries before taking an office job in Hangzhou. 

But the office was not where she wanted to stay. In 2016, Tian returned to her village in Chibi with a business plan. The villagers, mostly older and skeptical, did not trust her at first. Instead of arguing, she set up a small lab by the paddy fields and let the work speak for itself.

The road was not easy. Aquatic plants grew abnormally, making it difficult to catch crayfish. In the summer of 2021, more than half of her ducks died from heatstroke. The loss was not just livestock. It was over 100,000 yuan, roughly $14,000.

Instead of giving up, Tian began looking for answers in data. She recorded temperature, humidity, stocking density and water change intervals in her notebook. Then she crunched the numbers to figure out what went wrong and how to improve the system. 

Step by step, she developed a “rice-shrimp-duck” circular farming system. The model works by raising shrimp in the first half of the year, then growing rice and introducing ducks in the second half. The ducks eat pests and weeds, while their droppings fertilize the fields. In this way, one piece of land yields rice, ducks and shrimp, boosting output, saving resources and working with nature.

Her test plot grew from 3.3 hectares to 13.3 hectares of integrated rice-duck farming, and later expanded into a 106.7-hectare ecological base. The cooperative she organized grew from eight members to more than 200. Its annual output value, including antibiotic-free duck eggs, shrimp-rice and other products, has exceeded 5 million yuan.

In November 2024, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations included her low-carbon farming model as a case in “Ecological and Low-Carbon Food Systems in China.” When experts crouched by the field and lifted the soil in their hands, Tian felt that her years of effort had been worthwhile.

Many people might have stopped there. Tian, however, saw new questions emerging from the fields and turned to artificial intelligence for answers. She understood that experience alone could not keep pace with a rapidly changing agricultural environment. She needed a framework that could merge her field knowledge with the tools of the digital age. 

Her choice of Renmin University of China was not accidental. At RUC’s School of Smart Governance, she found an academic environment where researchers explore ways to connect digital technologies with China’s rural realities. The school’s emphasis on training AI specialists for practical application aligned with her own belief that technology should ultimately serve people and land.

Now Tian moves between seminar rooms and paddy fields. After lectures on machine learning, she tests sensors and data models in the fields where her work began.

When professors ask how data informs decision-making, Tian offers an answer drawn from her own laboratory. “Every data point from my fields is speaking for the ducks,” she says. 

For Tian, this is more than a metaphor. Data help translate the signals of her animals, including stress, hunger and heat, into information that algorithms can read and farmers can use.

For her, artificial intelligence is not an abstraction. It is a way to connect biological signals with practical decisions in agriculture. 

Over the next decade, Tian hopes to build a smarter farm, one where data answers the questions she once had to judge from experience alone: when to release water, when to introduce beneficial bacteria, and whether the ducks are at risk of overheating again.

From the paddies of Chibi to the AI classrooms of RUC, Tian is doing something concrete: making data work for agriculture and using algorithms to help farmers manage land more wisely.

As agriculture around the world turns toward artificial intelligence, Tian’s story is only beginning. 

(Adapted and translated by Dou Ailin and Liu Qiao, undergraduate students at the School of Foreign Languages, Renmin University of China.)