How can Chinese people keep their rice bowls if they don't earn money from growing grain?

One of the perks of being an agriculture reporter was that he could get away from the hustle and bustle of the city and often walk to the fields to see the vast farmland, the farms hidden by the green mountains and the magnificent water conservancy projects. Over the past year or so, I have been to pilot counties for new urbanization, pilot villages for land system reform, and various types of family farms, mountain ponds, vegetable greenhouses and pig farms.

In the process of stop-and-go, one of the most common phenomena I see is that farmers have been planting grain for many years, and then find that they have worked hard for most of their lives, but they still can't feed themselves and their families. They don't have money to send their children to school and send the elderly to see a doctor. In a hurry, the land is dropped and they go to the city to work to earn money. As a result, the fields became wasteland, and the elderly and children in the family became the left-behind population. Then, some village cadres had a flash of inspiration on a lonely night and found a broad road that could lead the village's left-behind population to become rich. That was to say goodbye to all rice and wheat. From now on, only cash crops would be planted. The more blueberries, strawberries and hawthorn, the better. These things were more expensive than grain and the city people loved to eat them. After that, the whole village innovated and transferred all the land to be replanted. In addition to selling fruits to earn a lot of money in the future, it could also engage in picking and farmhouse entertainment, which can be said to be a multi-pronged project. Or, some people simply transfer all the land to enterprises. They do whatever they want and rent it every year.

Therefore, in many rural areas I have passed through, I have seen a large number of orchards, greenhouses, farmhouses and agricultural holiday scenic spots. There are fewer and fewer contiguous grain fields, and the popularity of wheat, rice and soybeans is deteriorating.

There is no doubt that land circulation is a good medicine to solve the current agricultural development problems, because only when land circulation finally forms a certain scale and a few people carry out unified management and management for large areas of land can there be basic conditions for improving production efficiency. However, I don't know why land circulation changed its flavor as soon as it arrived at the grass-roots level. Some grass-roots cadres regarded land circulation as a political achievement project and set targets to force farmers to carry out circulation.

Last year, the per capita income of farmers in China was close to 9000 yuan, but less than a quarter of the income really came from farming. A farmer once calculated an account for me. The profit from planting one mu of rice was only tens of dollars no matter how he calculated it. This was still in good weather. If there was any natural disaster or man-made disaster,"it would be a loss to Grandma's family."

I have lived in Australia for several years. The more places I have traveled in China, I often unconsciously compare the farmers of the two countries in my heart. Of course, this comparison is limited to the part that can be seen in my eyes. Farmers in Australia have considerable social status and live freely and independently. Although they also work in the fields, they can often see proud smiles on their faces. In contrast, the peasants at home are like a boat drifting in the sea, drifting with the tide, helpless and powerless. Under such a reality, how can Chinese people hold their own jobs?