Growing strawberries with the help of waste heat and captured carbon dioxide

Inside sprawling greenhouses in Liaocheng, East China's Shandong province, cherries and strawberries are growing with some unlikely help from nearby industrial facilities — waste heat and captured carbon dioxide.

The resources are piped into Xinfa Group's modern agricultural industrial park, where the industrial conglomerate is applying technologies and production methods more commonly associated with factories to farming.

Established in 1972, the Liaocheng-based group operates more than 80 companies across aluminum, energy, chemicals, agriculture and other sectors. The group generated revenue of 320.8 billion yuan ($477.17 billion) in 2025, up 6 percent year-on-year.

Located in Liaocheng's Chiping district, the agricultural park covers about 133 hectares, with Xinfa investing 5 billion yuan in the project.

Zhang Xuexin, chairman of the group, said the park has developed four major farming businesses covering cherries, strawberries, largemouth bass and meat rabbits.

The park's annual production of cherries and strawberries has exceeded 500,000 kilograms each, with industrial-scale bass output also surpassing 500,000 kilograms.

"A rabbit breeding base began operations earlier this year and is designed to produce 16 million rabbits annually once it reaches full capacity," he added.

A key feature of the project is the reuse of resources generated by group's industrial operations.

Waste heat at 68 degrees Celsius and captured carbon dioxide from group's industrial facilities are channeled directly into greenhouses and livestock facilities, helping regulate growing conditions, cut energy costs and enable production outside traditional growing seasons.

The park has also integrated 11 intelligent control systems covering environmental management, irrigation, fertilizer use and supplemental lighting.

The Group is taking the approach further by building circular links between different farming operations.

Pan Xingwang, president of the group's agriculture unit, said waste from rabbit farming is returned to fields as fertilizer for fruit production, while nutrients recovered from fish farming are used for irrigation. Pruned branches and discarded leaves are fermented into fertilizer.

The company has also adopted vertical farming and multi-story livestock facilities to improve land-use efficiency.

Pan said the model is designed to combine industrial efficiency with agricultural production, turning waste streams into productive resources and creating a more integrated approach to modern farming and rural development.