Shandong has the largest surface area of greenhouses in China, containing almost 1/4 of the total greenhouses in the country. The Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences created a unique design for their greenhouse: thick brick northern walls to provide isolation from the wind, and plastic over the top and south side. This design extends the growing season, doubling the annual yield of fruits and vegetables. As a result, Shandong is the number one producer of produce in China. However, these greenhouses are not without their faults. The plastic used to make the greenhouses degrades quickly because of constant UV exposure, and must be replaced every three years. This results in 816 million pounds of plastic waste annually, about 4% of China’s total annual plastic waste. There are current efforts to recycle a greater percentage of agricultural plastic waste in China, including new regulations by the Chinese Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the National Development and Reform Commission, but currently only 180,000 tons are being recycled.
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, in the agricultural sector for crop protection, spraying, monitoring, and risk mitigation is greatly expanding at speeds unmatched in other countries. The number of agriculture drones reached 42,000 in 2020. According to farmers who have recently learned the machine, drones are over 10 times more efficient than skilled manpower, as well as more cost effective and environmentally friendly. Using drones also prevents farmers from breathing in the toxic pesticides as they spray.
The "Seed Cathedral", located in Shanghai, has been called the "most high profile seed bank the world has ever seen". It houses 60,000 different plant species. These seeds were sourced from a building called the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species at the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, located in Yunnan Province. Along with seeds, the Germplasm houses a micropropagation unit, animal gene bank, DNA bank, microbial gene bank, and nurseries.
Aquaculture is large part of Shandong's economy. This province alone accounted for 26% of China's aquaculture output in 2015. Fish are grown in large land breeding farms (pictured below). Each farm has 50 8 meter by 8 meter by 8 meter tanks filled with seawater, dissolved oxygen, and other chemicals to create ideal breeding conditions for the fish. Each tank can sustain over 1.5 tons of baby fish. These baby fish are released back to the sea in June when the ocean temperature is high enough (offshore fish farms pictured above).
Although aquaculture is a good way to prevent overfishing and the dangers that come with it, it is not a perfectly clean system. The wastewater (along with the nutrients, antibiotics, and fecal matter) from the tanks is released back into the ocean, and can have detrimental effects to local ecosystems. Pumping seawater into the sheds also requires a lot of electricity. There have been efforts to minimize these harmful effects, such as switching to "marine ranching", and recycling wastewater from farms to produce chemicals such as potassium sulfate, potassium chloride, and magnesium chloride for other uses.
