When farming pays well, the professionalization of farmers follows naturally

The Recommendations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Formulating the “13th Five-Year Plan” mentioned a term called “new-type professional farmer.” Although it is not a newly coined term, it still reveals the future direction of farmers and agriculture. The school where the author works has no shortage of agriculture-related majors, such as Chinese herbal medicine cultivation, and the training targets are also aimed at farmers. Perhaps at certain levels, through the professional and technical guidance of educational institutions, together with the coordinated arrangements and policy support of local governments, especially township-level grassroots governments, and the introduction of enterprise-based or cooperative business models, farmers at the core become skilled professional farmers engaged in cultivation work.

In fact, as an economic crop, the cultivation of Chinese herbal medicines reflects the difficulties farmers face when dealing with agricultural production on their own. For some time, because herbal farmers lacked scientific cultivation knowledge and skills and lacked or received delayed market information, some Chinese medicinal materials have already suffered serious problems such as variety degeneration and excessive pesticide residues, and farmers often face sharp declines in income or being unable to make ends meet. The root cause is that small-scale, household-by-household operations leave farmers with very low capacity to cope with market risks. Therefore, herbal farmers, like other farmers, often need to go to cities to work and supplement household income, existing in a half-worker, half-farmer state. From an occupational perspective, these people are no longer professional farmers.

Thus, the problems faced by herbal farmers are similar to those of ginger farmers and garlic farmers. In addition to growing crops, they also need to consider many factors such as market risks, which is to say they have worries beyond cultivation itself. In the author's view, if farmers are to become professional farmers, the most critical thing to ensure is this: laborers who devote themselves to agricultural production must be able to obtain relatively stable and predictable returns. Only with material security can farmers break away from the half-worker, half-farmer state. In this way, crop quality and yield will also be guaranteed, bringing stability to the lives of urban residents and to other industries that use agricultural products as raw materials. Just like the industrialization of traditional Chinese medicine, it requires a stable supply of Chinese herbal medicines.

Therefore, the biggest problem now is whether all parties can form a joint force to create a good working environment for farmers and help them eliminate their worries. In this process, support in technology, capital and policy is indispensable, which involves the full cooperation of research institutions that possess technology, enterprises or financing platforms that possess capital, and local governments. The school where the author works has long provided technical guidance for Chinese herbal medicine cultivation in Mashan Town, Changqing District, Jinan. The Traditional Chinese Medicine Cultural Industrial Park here was led and built by the local government, with several traditional Chinese medicine research institutions responsible for overall planning, and enterprises in the health industry were introduced to invest in and undertake construction. Through land transfer, farmers working as laborers, and profit sharing, it has radiated outward and driven surrounding farmers to cultivate 18000 mu of Chinese medicinal materials, forming an industrial chain, and the income per mu of herbal farmers has generally increased three to five times. In fact, this is the effect of agricultural scale. Farmers are like workers in a production workshop: as long as they are responsible for growing high-quality crops, they can maintain relatively stable returns.

Of course, this is only an ideal state. At present, most areas that can form this model were already in a relatively advantageous position in agricultural production before introducing scale, for example, Mashan Town is a traditional producing area for Chinese herbal medicines. Then, whether this large-scale production of “unified cultivation, unified services, unified standards, unified purchasing, unified sales” can be expanded to other places, or whether other places have certain factors that can attract technology, capital and policy to form a joint force, all brings uncontrollable factors to the training of new-type professional farmers. Even with such a distinctive product or distinctive industry, the formation of an integrated industrial chain will probably encounter resistance in many aspects such as land transfer. Otherwise, people would not always see all kinds of requests for help online: a certain place has a bumper harvest of a distinctive product, yet it rots in the fields because it cannot be sold.

In the final analysis, no matter which method is adopted and no matter how many parties participate, the most critical thing is still to let farmers truly benefit from it, and only those models that bring benefits to farmers can be promoted widely. Many times, farmers' resistance to large-scale operation is precisely because they worry that their own interests will be harmed, just as when the school where the author works first provided free technical guidance to herbal farmers, someone asked, “What exactly are you after?” Indeed, when the school trains farmers, behind it are academic project tasks and corresponding research funding, and the capital investment of enterprises cannot possibly be purely charity. From this, it can also be seen that the multiple forces participating in agricultural scale and industrialization all have their own interest demands, so a force is needed to find the common ground among the interests of all parties. Here, the provision of research funding and the support of business policies play the role of government. To fill the shortcoming of farmers, agriculture and rural areas, what is ultimately tested is still the government's attitude toward farmers' interests. (The author is a teacher at Shandong Pharmaceutical Technician College)