[Sanxia Observation] Trans-Regional Harvest: A Great Innovation in Agricultural Mechanization

In mid-June, the reporter met Li Yongqiang and his wife Huang Huihua in Xiping County, Henan Province. The two couples were busy working together in the “granary of the Central Plains” to harvest wheat for the grain farmers. Hundreds of thousands of agricultural machinerymen, like Li Yongqiang, have taken over 90% of the wheat harvested in the main producing areas.

“This year, the harvest price per hectare of wheat ranges from 40 to 50 yuan, and one machine can collect 100 acres of land a day, and a harvest season can earn 30,000 to 60,000 yuan.” Li Yongqiang said that they began collecting wheat at 4 or 5 in the morning until It is not until 11 o'clock in the evening. During the day in the cab in the high temperature of 50 to 60 degrees Celsius, most of the time in the evening is to rest in the carriage or wheat warehouse.

From April to July each year, from the Sichuan Basin to the Huanghuai Plain, to the North China Plain and even to the Loess Plateau, there is a cyclical "migration" of the world's largest harvester. Following the gradual maturation of wheat, the army of harvesters like the migratory birds fought in the North and won the hard work of the farmers.

According to the statistics of the Ministry of Agriculture, the number of combine harvesters put into Sansha production this year is 510,000, of which more than 325,000 are involved in cross-regional operations. It is estimated that about 90% of wheat will be mechanized and about 80% of corn will be mechanized. sowing.

As with "production for households", cross-regional operations of harvesters are also a major innovation for Chinese farmers. In 1986, Wentingyu, a farmer from Wujiabao Village, Taigu County, Shanxi Province, together with five farmers, voluntarily organized a team of harvesters to go to the field and use the time difference of mature wheat to carry out cross-regional operations, becoming the earliest domestic cross-regional agricultural machinery team. In the early 90s of the last century, the scope of cross-regional machine coverage spread to Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Hebei, and Henan.

Cross-regional operations have achieved large-scale agricultural operations on the basis of stabilizing rural households' contracting operations, and opened up practical ways for small-scale agriculture to use large-scale agricultural machinery for large-scale, intensive, and modern production. In 1996, for the first time, the Ministry of Agriculture organized the “Sanxia” inter-regional machine harvesting wheat meeting in Henan Province and opened a prelude to the large-scale organization of cross-regional harvesting of combine harvesters.

The wheat harvest period is the most complex and changeable climate in a year. However, few farmers are still guilty of “Longkou” losing food. Mechanized harvesting not only reduces the labor intensity of farmers, but also greatly improves the efficiency. It takes only two or three hours for a farmer to receive crops. The harvest time in the main wheat producing areas is reduced from half a month to about a week. Hebei province used only 15 days to harvest all wheat last year, five days less than the previous year, and created a new record of 571 million mu per day in the province. Shandong province last year reopened for more than a week due to climatic reasons than the average year, but it still managed to complete the wheat harvest within the solar season. As the harvesters replaced manpower, the "homecoming tide" of migrant workers could not be seen in the "three summers" busy season.

According to the data from the Ministry of Agriculture, the comprehensive mechanization level of cultivated crops in China has reached 54.5%, and has made outstanding contributions to increasing grain production, increasing farmers' income, and accelerating the transformation of agricultural development methods. Today, agricultural operations services have become an important channel for increasing farmers' income. For example, the wheat combine harvester in Shandong Province has grown from 2,883 units in 1994 to 130,000 units today, an increase of 23 times. The number of wheat combine harvesters that participated in the cross-region operation grew from less than 100 units to more than 80,000 units. For more than 10 years, Shandong Province alone has achieved more than 30 billion yuan in income from cross-regional operations of agricultural machinery.

According to the data, during the “11th Five-Year Plan” period, the central government has invested 35.1 billion yuan in subsidies for the purchase of agricultural machinery, which has driven local and peasants to invest more than 110.5 billion yuan, subsidize purchases of 10.78 million sets of agricultural machinery and 9.07 million households. Driven by the subsidy policy for the purchase of agricultural machinery, the total amount of agricultural machinery equipment has increased significantly, and large-horsepower, multi-functional, high-performance and weak agricultural machinery have grown rapidly. The average annual growth rates of medium and large tractors, rice transplanters, and combine harvesters reached 22.9%, 33.1%, and 15.8%, respectively.

Thanks to successive years' purchase subsidies for agricultural machinery and machinery, the major producing provinces not only can meet the needs of the province, but even other compound work machines can meet the basic needs of the province. Therefore, the inter-provincial operation market has gradually given way to the “mainong market” from the “hand-operated market” several years ago. In cross-regional operations, there has been a new phenomenon of "long-distance operations" in which the number of long-distance operations has decreased, and the radius of cross-regions has gradually narrowed.

In Shandong, the number of locomotives in the province has been decreasing year by year, from 40,000 in 2010 to 30,000 in 2011, and this year it is expected to be 20,000. At the same time, the number of order operations in the province has increased significantly. In Anhui, due to the increase in the number of combined harvesters, rising fuel prices and rising labor costs, trans-regional operations are mainly inter-provincial and county-wide, with cross-county operations becoming the main form.

“The level of mechanization has become an important factor affecting the willingness of farmers to engage in agricultural production, and thus affecting the effective supply of food and other bulk products.” Zong Jinyao, Director of the Department of Agricultural Mechanization Management of the Ministry of Agriculture, said, “Henan Province has more than 20 million rural laborers. In the case of migrant workers, the grain production capacity has not shrunk and stabilized at the level of 100 billion kilograms. In Hunan and other places, single-season rice has been restored to double-season rice in recent years, and the improvement of the mechanization level is a key factor.”