Aliday is like a family day held every year on May 10th. This year’s Aliday puts a spotlight on a special group, called “a new type of skilled farmers”. The e-commerce giant invites more than a dozen “new farmers” from poor counties across the country on Thursday to its headquarters in Hangzhou to experience Alibaba-developed advanced technologies.Blockchain-based applications whip up these farmers’ interest.

This group of farmers, who have been skilled in using e-commerce and internet tools, crave for being equipped with advanced technologies. Some farmers are eager to learn how to know customers’ preferences and tailored needs beforehand through big data analysis so that they produce more readily marketable agricultural products. Some others hope to leverage blockchian technology to improve agricultural products traceability in the supply chain.

In a display area, Alibaba staff shows the invited farmers how to use blockchain to tackle rice products: from the farm to the dining table, each bag of rice will be given a specific ID, information about pesticides residues, additive and heavy metal residue will be recorded on a tamper-proof blockchain so as to solve the tainted rice problem.

In fact, Alibaba Group has already applied blockchain technology to tackle fake eggs, rice and other food items in real life. It has teamed up with New Zealand dairy brand Fonterra in early May to pilot the  blockchain-based Food Trust Framework to trace the supply chain from the dairy producer in New Zealand to consumers in China. This blockchain pilot project aims to improve the traceability and transparency of the entire “end-to-end” supply chain as well as to fight against counterfeit consumer goods.

In the special Aliday, Alibaba intends to raise Chinese farmers’ awareness of the power of the state-of-the-art technologies,and enable them to improve production efficiency. In addition to blockchian application, Alibaba group also introduced other advanced tools application scenarios for farming , including the application of AI in raising pigs, as well as pesticide residue detectors, heat detectors, and sweetness detectors.

Zhang Yong, CEO of Alibaba Group, said at the event that Alibaba Economy is being formed, and as the representative of China’s digital economy , Alibaba needs to take more social responsibility and creates new value.

Aliday commemorates a day in its history whereby a colleague became ill during the SARS outbreak in 2003 and all employees were quarantined to prevent further illness. This day is a time when Alibaba staff can bring their family and loved ones to the office campus to share a day of fun together.