Rural development needs a new type of agriculture-related talents

Whether rural development needs talents or not is not a problem. The development of any region needs talents. However, the lack of talents in rural development is also a practical problem. The phenomenon of "siphoning" of rural talents to cities has lasted for many years. To solve the problem of shortage of talents in rural areas and attract more talents to join agriculture, it is necessary to have a new cognition and form a new consensus in society.

According to the Department of Agriculture of Guangdong Province, 11 counties (cities, districts) of Guangdong Province were selected as key demonstration counties for cultivating new professional farmers by the Ministry of Agriculture in 2015. The provincial agricultural department will study and formulate the identification standards and support policies for new professional farmers this year. In fact, not only Guangdong is promoting the cultivation of professional farmers, Shaanxi, Shandong, Jiangsu and other places to promote the certification of professional farmers have also repeatedly appeared in newspapers, for example, recently Shaanxi Province to the second batch of 182 farmers issued a "new senior professional farmers" certification certificate, was nicknamed by netizens "to farmers senior title."

Is it good or bad to give farmers a title? Is there a real need? In terms of short-term interests, whether farmers have professional titles or not is not necessarily related to their agricultural production. Whether they have professional titles or not, they should plant what they should plant and raise what they should raise. However, in terms of long-term interests, agricultural development cannot always stay at a low level, and agriculture cannot be modernized without the help of modern agricultural science and technology. As early as 2012, the Central Document No. 1 clearly stated that "vigorously cultivate new professional farmers". Since they are new professional farmers, of course, they are different from traditional farmers. This "new type" should have at least three points: culture, technology and management. However, we should face up to a fundamental problem of brain drain in rural areas: the loss of rural professional and technical personnel and the flow of rural young and middle-aged labor force to cities. The loss of talents in these two aspects leads to a weak foundation for cultivating professional farmers: the front-line teachers and students are relatively scarce.

What should I do? First analyze the reasons why the teacher and student base of professional farmers are small. First of all, a large number of students majoring in agriculture are unwilling to return to agricultural posts. The reason why they are unwilling to go back is that the township agricultural technology service center changed from a public institution to a mass organization in 2005. The students 'concept cannot be changed temporarily and they think that the promotion channel to public servants has been cut off. The shortage of agricultural technicians in villages and towns directly leads to the shortage of teachers for farmers 'technical training. The second is that although university student village officials have been started long ago, many of them belong to the "gilded" nature. They have little or no understanding of agricultural science and technology and cannot undertake the functions of rural front-line technical research and training. Third, due to the low income of agricultural production, rural young and middle-aged labor force with certain cultural foundation has become the mainstream. Between professional migrant workers and professional farmers, more people choose the former.

The difficulty lies here, and the opportunity lies here. It should also be noted that under the wave of mobile Internet, the agricultural outlook is undergoing tremendous changes. The meeting between agriculture and "Internet +" has brought many fresh stories and opportunities to agriculture. Analyzing the current O2O entrepreneurship phenomenon, we can see that agricultural O2O is in full swing, and the original ecological agricultural products and high-quality agricultural products are generating a new wave of wealth creation opportunities through mobile e-commerce and community e-commerce. Chu orange, willow peach, Pan apple once led the fashion, new agricultural planting and marketing model and endless. However, one of the foundations of agricultural e-commerce is the quality of agricultural products themselves. This will inevitably require farmers to improve agricultural technology standards, give farmers professional titles, and promote the quality of professional farmers, which will become the new needs of the times.

In order for farmers to be willing to become professional farmers and participate in the evaluation of agricultural titles, they must take the lead in leading a decent and dignified life, which requires two drivers: one is profit driven and the other is honor driven. From the point of view of interests, the government should give professional farmers preferential policies for real money and silver, and the higher the professional title, the more choices they should be given in terms of loans and training. From the point of view of honor, it is necessary to give honor through more ways such as title evaluation, so that professional farmers can become decent occupations. Entering the ranks of professional farmers requires a certain threshold. Even if the threshold is not high, it will show that "professional farmers" are a relatively independent type of work, which will help expand the source of professional farmers.

There are opportunities for rural development, and talents are the key. This requires us to think more ways, give more preferential policies, work together in many ways, including agricultural title evaluation to promote the development of professional farmers.