Relying on the hot zone, facing the whole country and radiating to South and Southeast Asia, the College of Tropical Crops of Yunnan Agricultural University mainly cultivates applied talents in modern special agriculture, recreation and tourism, ethnic culture inheritance, and innovation in the hot zone. The college is located in Pu'er City, "the source of tea in the world and the capital of coffee in China," covering an area of 588 acres, with 1 national training base, 8 provincial demonstration bases, 3 on-campus training bases, 62 off-campus training bases and 608 acres of off-campus training bases. The college has more than 10,000 full-time students, more than 530 adult correspondence students, 277 teaching staff, including 51 with senior titles, 121 with master's degree or above, 6 master's tutors, 3 provincial teaching masters, 1 post expert of Yunnan Modern Agricultural Industry System, and 2 consultants of Yunnan Highland Special Industries Promotion Association Expert Group.

The College of Tropical Crops attaches great importance to teaching and scientific research and has achieved new breakthroughs in teaching and scientific research. In 2020, the College declared and was approved to add the new master's degree in forestry and two new provincial engineering centers; it won four scientific and technological progress awards at the provincial and ministerial levels and two teaching achievement awards at the university level. Around the school to accelerate the "double first-class" construction goals, the college further deepened the reform of institutional mechanisms, the construction of advantageous discipline platform, successfully declared two national platforms, five provincial platforms, university-level platform 1, 294 various scientific research projects at all levels. Fifty-seven patents were granted, including 3 invention patents, published 67 books and more than 400 papers, including 1 SCI, 4 EI, and 88 core journals. Dispatched 86 scientific and technical personnel from three regions and trained more than 3,000 farmers. Cooperate with the government, enterprises, and other universities and sign 59 cooperation agreements; carry out technical training to serve the local economy and the three rural areas, involving more than 8,000 people in training.

The College of Tropical Crops has 6 teaching departments. It offers 13 applied undergraduate majors, 19 specialized majors, and 9 specialized undergraduate majors in civil engineering, economics, and e-commerce, such as agronomy (tropical crops direction), food science and engineering, herbal medicine cultivation and identification, e-commerce, and secretarial science. The college pays attention to the training of graduates' employment and entrepreneurial ability. It constantly improves students' employment and competitive entrepreneurial ability by carrying out vocational skills training, entrepreneurial experience and practice, counseling and training for further studies, and introducing famous enterprises. In the past 5 years, the college has guided (incubated) students to achieve an average of 9.2 independent entrepreneurial projects each year, 155 innovation and entrepreneurship projects each year, and organized students to participate in national, provincial, and local innovation and entrepreneurship and vocational skills competitions to win 71 awards. In 2020, the College's hot zone crowdsourcing space was recognized by the Yunnan Provincial Department of Science and Technology as "Cloud Science Crowdsourcing Space."

Over the years, the College of Tropical Crops has been promoting the "integration of industry and education, practice cultivation" talent training model, taking the vocational ability and professionalism of industry positions as the guide, highlighting practical teaching, focusing on cultivating students' innovative spirit, and strengthening students' practical ability training. Taking advantage of school-enterprise cooperation, it actively promotes the reform of talent training mode, optimizes the curriculum system, focuses on cultivating students' application ability and innovation ability, and strives to cultivate high-quality composite technical skills talents in the hot zone in the new era.