Putian City, Fujian Province, east China - Recent (CCTV - No access Chinese mainland)
1. Various of rice transplanters working in paddy field
2. SOUNDBITE (Chinese) Chen Fengping, president of agricultural machinery cooperative (ending with shot 3):
"Our cooperative will plant 106.67 hectares of rice this year. Three rice transplanters are equipped with the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System."
3. Rice transplanter working in paddy field
4. Various of paddy field
5. Rice transplanter working in paddy field
6. Various of people installing equipment on rice transplanter
7. Various of Chen supervising operation of rice transplanter with smartphone

Spring sowing is underway in paddy fields of Putian City, east China's Fujian Province.

Rice transplanters supported by the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System have been put into operation as a mean to raise efficiency while keeping precision and saving costs.

"Our cooperative will plant 106.67 hectares of rice this year. Three rice transplanters are equipped with the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System," said Chen Fengping, president of a local agricultural machinery cooperative.

He said that with the system, each transplanter can plant up to 0.5 hectares of rice in an hour and farmers are allowed to monitor its real-time operation on their mobile phones.

China's homegrown BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) is China's largest space-based system and one of four global navigation networks alongside US' GPS, Russia's GLONASS and the European Union's Galileo.

The country officially commissioned BDS on July 31 of 2020, opening the latest BDS-3 system to global users.

Currently, 45 BDS satellites are in orbit and the scale of the BDS industrial system had exceeded 400 billion yuan (around 62.92 billion U.S. dollars) by the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), according to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

By the end of 2021, more than 100,000 agricultural machines had been equipped with automatic driving systems based on the BDS.