Realizing agricultural modernization under the condition of protecting farmers

[The direction of China's agricultural modernization should be to provide services to thousands of ordinary farmers in this way, and the "three rural" policy should give consideration to agriculture and farmers.]

These two days, everyone is talking about agricultural modernization. Not long ago, the author went to Sheyang County in Jiangsu Province to investigate and found that the "joint farming and planting" promoted by them in recent years has solved the agricultural modernization problem under the condition of small farmers, and has really given consideration to the solution of agricultural problems and farmers 'problems.

In agriculture, China has more people and less land and fewer resources. How to ensure that the Chinese people eat well and eat well, agriculture has a long way to go. As far as farmers are concerned, there are still nearly 700 million rural people in China, more than 200 million farmers and more than 200 million agricultural laborers. Most of the 200 million migrant workers who work in cities and do business cannot settle down in cities. Their parents still stay in villages to farm. They work in cities when they are young and may return home to farm when they are old. That is to say, China still has nearly 900 million people closely linked to agriculture and rural areas, and peasant families still need income and employment opportunities from agriculture.

To solve agricultural problems, we must arm agriculture with modern equipment and technology and realize agricultural modernization. However, consideration should also be given to China's large agricultural population, the small amount of farmland per worker in rural areas and the scattered and fragmented plots of land. In this context, how to improve agricultural equipment and technology? How to modernize agriculture while protecting farmers? This is indeed the focus and difficulty of China's current "three rural" policy.

Let's see how the sun does it. Sheyang is a large agricultural county with 2.02 million mu of cultivated land, mainly planted with rice and wheat. In order to achieve fairness when dividing farmland to households,"good farmland is divided into households and bad farmland is shared by households", the management scale of farmers is very small and the plots are scattered, forming a common pattern of "one field with many households" and "one household with many fields". It is not conducive to the operation of large-scale agricultural machinery in the fields, but also because of scattered management and various crops in thousands of households, resulting in different varieties, different sowing times and even different sowing methods, so it is difficult to provide agricultural technical services in the fields and households. However, due to the limited income from agricultural operation, a large number of young and middle-aged rural laborers work in cities, and most of them stay in villages for farming are elderly farmers over 55 years old. Because of the weak labor force, the elderly farmers have poor absorption capacity for new agricultural technologies, so agricultural production is becoming more and more extensive, thus affecting agricultural output and reducing agricultural returns.

In view of such a situation, Sheyang County, through "joint cultivation and joint planting," broke the existing 30 mu of "one field with multiple households" strip field, broke the field ridge, connected into a square, determined unified varieties through consultation, unified cultivated land and sowing by cooperative organizations, farmers responsible for water and fertilizer management, pest control and other field management links, thus changing the previous pattern of decentralized land management and serious fragmentation.

And because the high-powered machinery can work from this field, it is possible to return straw to the field. Through joint farming and planting, under the condition of not excluding farmers and not transferring farmers 'land, the equipment and technology level of agriculture has been improved, farmers' agricultural expenditure has been reduced, farmers 'income has been increased, agricultural output has been increased, and agricultural productivity has been truly released.

Since August 2013, when the "joint cultivation and joint planting" was promoted, hundreds of thousands of mu of cultivated land in the whole county have joined the "joint cultivation and joint planting", the degree of agricultural mechanization has been greatly improved in a short period of time, and advanced agricultural production technologies represented by rice mechanical planting and wheat drilling have been rapidly popularized. "Joint farming and joint planting" is especially popular with the elderly and women whose family labor force is relatively weak.

The practice of "joint farming and planting" in Sheyang County, the most important thing is that under the condition of not excluding farmers, especially the elderly and women with weak labor force, the agricultural production capacity has been rapidly improved and the agricultural modernization has been realized by breaking the field ridge, promoting mechanization and organically combining agricultural machinery and agronomy.

At present, great changes are taking place in China's agricultural productivity. There are three important choices: first, the rapid advancement of agricultural mechanization; second, a large number of young and middle-aged rural laborers entering the city; and third, the separation of land contractors and operators.

The rapid change of productivity requires the corresponding adjustment of rural production relations. Sheyang County facilitates the operation of large-scale agricultural machinery by breaking the ridge. Large-scale agricultural machinery operation not only reduces the cost of agricultural machinery operation, but also can realize straw returning to field, can accommodate new agronomy of machine transplanting and drilling wheat, and through unified seed and unified cultivation, it becomes easy to prevent diseases and insect pests at the same time, manage water and fertilizer of rice and wheat, and implement various social services.

Different from Sheyang County, Shayang County of Hubei Province is mainly hilly area, the area of each land is not large, when the field is divided into households, in order to achieve fairness, the land of Shayang County is divided into more finely divided, often ten mu of land per household is divided into four aspects of southeast and northwest, seven or eight large and small pieces. In the past, there was a surplus of rural labor force, and the degree of mechanization was not high. It did not matter if the contracted land was scattered. Up to now, after the young and middle-aged rural labor force enters the city to work and do business, the elderly and women with weaker labor force are very tired of planting. Farmers hope to concentrate their scattered land in one piece, preferably one piece. Therefore, Shayang County guides farmers to cultivate according to their households by means of the rural land rights being promoted.

According to farmers in Shayang County, labor input and production costs can be reduced by more than 1/3 if contracted land previously scattered in different directions is concentrated into one piece by household. The most important thing is that the land is concentrated in one piece, which can facilitate mechanical work in the fields, so that the elderly and women in the weaker rural areas can still plant good fields.

Whether it is "joint farming and planting" or "joint farming according to households", only a slight adjustment of the land relationship can release huge agricultural productivity, and this released agricultural productivity does not exclude the elderly and women who have become the main body of agriculture with weak physical strength, thus giving consideration to agricultural development and farmers 'farming and income.

The author thinks that the direction of China's agricultural modernization should not be to exclude farmers, let farmers quit agriculture, and support the main body of new agricultural management, but to provide services for thousands of ordinary farmers.