Ma's online operation is just what the government is looking for.
At a regular meeting of the State Council in March, Premier Li Keqiang made it clear that it was crucial to modernize the agriculture industry, with technology playing a major role.
"The central government has so far allocated 3.7 billion yuan this year to support e-commerce development in central and western parts of China's rural area," Shen Danyang, spokesperson at the Ministry of Commerce, said last month. "Financial support will cover about 200 counties in 26 provinces. This will help farmers, create more jobs and increase incomes."
Half of China's 1.34 billion population live in villages, and at the end of 2010, 125 million were connected to the Internet, a report by the China Internet Network Information Center revealed. The figure has since climbed to 186 million by the end of June this year.
But more work still needs to be done to help farmers and merchants connect to the Web and boost their sales and incomes online.
Tang Lin, who comes from Biancang town in Jiangsu province, has set up a "service station", or small store, to help farmers order agricultural-related products online, such as pesticides and fertilizers.
"A lot of the farmers are not tech-savvy enough to shop online," he said. "So they often come to me for help. Gradually, I became a purchasing agent and now I make small money out of the business," he added, pointing out that most of the younger generation like him no longer farm themselves.
The major e-commerce companies are also playing a vital role in helping farmers improve their Internet skills.
Alibaba built 1,803 village-level Taobao Rural Service Stations in 17 provinces last year－part of a 10 billion yuan investment plan over the next five years. And JD.com has been encouraging employees, who are from rural areas, to go back to their hometowns to set up delivery businesses.
"We hope each village in China can have a born-and-bred farmer, who can work as a catalyst to educate the entire village about e-commerce," Zhang Yong, chief executive officer of Alibaba, said in Zhejiang province last month.
Apart from tech-related issues, farmers also need specialist advice on what fertilizers to buy and knowledge about crop diseases. Ma, from Linyi city, taps into his father's vast agricultural experience to come up with answers to problems.
"Farmers usually send me photos of their products and let me give a diagnosis for their plants," he said.
Ni Liang, senior director of Taobao, expects e-commerce to boost incomes for farmers and improve the entire logistics chain. "From buying seeds and farming equipment online to improving agricultural knowledge, e-commerce will play a major role," he said. "Ultimately, this will help sell more high quality products online and boost incomes in the farming sector."
Big data will also be crucial. This is a broad term for processing vast amounts of complex statistics, which can be boiled down into market and consumer trends.
In the agricultural industry, oversupply can force farmers to sell their crops at knockdown prices. Hopefully, that will change in the future.
"With more farmers buying and selling online, we can eventually gather enough data to predict the supply and demand situation through big data technology," Ni said. "That is the ultimate goal."
But analysts believe there is still a long way to go before the online farming industry can be sustainable as well as financially successful.
Wang Xiaoxing, an analyst with Beijing-based Internet consultancy Analysys International, said that quality control needs to be tightened up.
"Unlike consumers products, if you find fake goods, customers can return them, but farmers who buy fake fertilizer or fake seeds can rarely spot the problem until it is too late," he added.
