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BEIJING, Feb. 8 (Xinhua) -- For thousands of years, the Chinese idiom "face to the soil and back to the sky" has been used to describe the agricultural toil of farmers. Now, this traditional farming method is coming to an end as China accelerates efforts to build a robust agricultural industry. A viral video doing the rounds across China's social media recently showed how agriculture has quite literally moved into the fast line. A man is seen feeding free-range chickens in the hills of Wenzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, from the comfort of his track car, with the chickens in hot pursuit. The clip quickly gained traction online, with one netizen noting, "It saves both time and effort. Farmers are so relaxed now." Another particularly enthused commenter said, "I even want to buy a ticket for this modern chicken-feeding experience." The roots of China's status as an agricultural country run deep. Over the past few decades, however, farmers' gazes are just as likely to be focused on smart devices as the soil beneath their feet thanks to the agricultural modernization drive. Today, tech-based farm facilities are a common sight across rural China, and more and more "new farmers," both veterans who are willing to embrace advanced technology and well-educated young people with new ideas and farming skills, are springing up. At an olive grove in Wudu District of Longnan City, northwest China's Gansu Province, modern farming methods have brought earth-shaking changes to the land, which is considered one of the birthplaces of China's farming civilization. With the roar of their engines, transport trucks loaded with fertilizer and farm tools climb slowly along a silver track to terraces bursting with olive trees. Zhao Ciping, a resident in Hejiaping Village in Longnan, easily unloaded two bags of fertilizer and a rotary tiller from the transport machine and headed for his olive grove. "Our elder generation of farmers would move fertilizer up, and fruit down these steep slopes, and mostly relied on human labor, too. Not only was it exhausting work, but also it was dangerous," the new farmer recalled. "Thanks to the government, the transport track was built here last year." Developed by the local agricultural machinery department and universities, the transport system can carry 200 kg of goods at a time, and climb 500 meters in 11 minutes, which significantly reduces production costs and improves industrial efficiency, according to Zhao Haiyun, director of the Wudu District's olive industry development office. Currently, a total of 106 transport tracks have been installed in Longnan, stretching 66.7 km. Olive growers in Wudu are driving the growth of the industry by combining modern technologies with traditional agriculture. The mutually beneficial relationship was not missed by Emmanouil Kampourakis, associate professor at Hellenic Mediterranean University. When he gave a six-day workshop on olive cultivation techniques in Wudu in mid-December last year, he commented on the methodical approach to the cultivation, picking and processing of Chinese olives. In the adjacent Hanzhong City, northwest China's Shaanxi Province, a team of new farmers are using tech to improve vegetable planting. A 200-mu (about 13.33 hectares) smart farm is now attended by just five workers. Previously, it took 20 people a whole season to finish planting a 1-mu plot. According to Guo Qiang, general manager of the Shaanxi Riliguanghe Biotechnology Co., Ltd., which operates the farm, they have developed eight sets of agricultural intelligent equipment with independent intellectual property rights, realizing the automatic production of the whole process, including vegetable sowing, digital management, automatic harvesting, and intelligent sorting and packaging. China unveiled its "No. 1 central document" for 2024 early this month, which is the first policy statement released by China's central authorities each year and seen as an indicator of policy priorities. "To promote Chinese modernization, it is essential to consolidate the foundations of agriculture continuously and push forward rural revitalization comprehensively," the document said. It calls for efforts to strengthen the role of sci-tech development in promoting rural revitalization. A more futuristic scene of farming is being played out on the outskirts of the eastern metropolis of Shanghai, which is more than 1,500 km away from Hanzhong. Guided by cutting-edge technologies -- China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, 5G signals and sensors such as lidars and gyroscopes, an AI farming robot was busy ploughing the field in Tinglin Town. Farmers can now simply log on to a WeChat app account with their mobile phones and control the robot with an app. "The accuracy of the robot's driving error is within 2 cm. Its operating speed can reach 3 to 5 km per hour, equivalent to a farmer ploughing for several days," said Wang Jinyue, chairman of Shanghai Diantian agricultural professional cooperative. As China's population ages, the production structure of traditional farms, which rely heavily on human labor, is unsustainable. However, the digital transformation of agriculture effectively makes up for the shortage of employees, Wang said. According to Wang, the expenditure, including fuel costs and salaries, of sowing 1-mu-land by tractors was about 80 yuan (11.26 U.S. dollars), and now it has dropped to costs as low as 50 yuan to run robots driven by new energy. Through precise sowing by robots, the amount of seeds consumed per mu can be reduced from about 25 kg to 10 kg, which saves farmers around 100 yuan per mu. In fact, costs across the board from weeding to fertilization have all dropped, and helped to increase farmers' income, which is also highlighted in China's "No. 1 central document" for 2024. During the past seven years, more than 70 new farmers employed at the operative have developed over 60 types of farm robots, ranging from plowing, planting, spraying, weeding to harvesting. Data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs shows that the contribution rate of China's agricultural science and technology progress reached 62.4 percent in 2022. Nationwide, the rate of mechanization in crop plowing, planting and harvesting had risen from 67.2 percent in 2017 to 73 percent in 2022. Helped by increased contributions from agricultural machinery and technology, China secured a grain harvest of over 650 million tonnes for the ninth consecutive year in 2023. Yu Ningkai, director of the rural development institute under the Shaanxi Academy of Social Sciences, said China managed to feed about 20 percent of the world's population with around 7 percent of the world's arable land, and has made remarkable achievements in agricultural development. Over thousands of years of Chinese agricultural development, every time the farm tools have been upgraded, it has promoted the progress of human agricultural civilization, Yu added. "The new farmers are not only sowing the seeds of hope for China's modern farming, but also providing a useful reference for the agricultural development of other countries," said Deng Xiaohong, a deputy researcher with the School of Economics, Lanzhou University. China has also set a higher target, aiming to further increase the comprehensive mechanization rate in crop plowing, planting and harvesting to 75 percent by 2025. The world's second-largest economy is promoting a raft of measures to improve rural industries' development, including strengthening the R&D and application of large and medium-sized intelligent agricultural machinery, breeding and promoting crop varieties suitable for mechanized operations, and carrying out machine-oriented transformation of farmland. （Editor:Liao Yifan） |
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