张昊Hao Zhang

In the summer of 2020, I joined a volunteer team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Minqin, Gansu. We spent two weeks laying straw checkerboards to hold the dunes in place, then planted saxaul shrubs in the squares. As soon as I lifted my spade, sand slipped back into the hole. I returned the next two summers.

In graduate school, a few classmates and I started Mangzhong. We built a hollow drill that opens at planting depth, giving the seedling time to drop before the sand covers its roots. I founded Shanghai Mangzhizhong Technology Co., Ltd. and led the team that built our pilot-scale desert shrub planter. I finished my master’s in energy and power engineering in March 2026 and have since joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Inner Mongolia Research Institute. We are building equipment to lay straw checkerboards and refining the feeder and planting mechanism so the vehicle can plant more seedlings per shift.

At Shanghai’s INCLUSION Conference, we met staff from the Zhanjiang Mangrove National Nature Reserve, who invited us to see how seedlings are planted at low tide. Workers carrying seedlings can sink waist-deep in mud, so we are designing a wide, hull-shaped chassis to carry the planter across the flats while keeping its feeding and planting mechanisms.

A CCTV production team introduced us to Golden Manor, a strawberry grower in Lishui, Nanjing. Ripe berries often hang behind green ones, so we are developing picking arms that reach in from the side and soft trays to receive the fruit without bruising it.