Deepening Comprehensive Rural Reform: How to Build a New Agricultural Operating System
Jia Weitao is a well-known large-scale grain grower in Heli Village, Wenshang County, Jining City, Shandong Province. He began transferring land in 2007, and today his family's farming scale has exceeded 1600 mu. In his view, large-scale farming has many advantages: “the cost of purchasing chemical fertilizers and pesticides is lower, and using large machinery makes labor more efficient.” In a good harvest year, 1600 mu of land can bring in more than 800,000 yuan in net income, which fills him with drive and convinces him that large-scale farming is the right path.
The Comprehensive Implementation Plan for Deepening Rural Reform, recently issued by the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council, emphasizes that developing various forms of appropriately scaled agricultural operations is the only way to agricultural modernization. The Plan also proposes building a three-dimensional, composite modern agricultural operating system suited to national conditions and the stage of development, based on household family farming, linked by cooperation and association, and supported by socialized services.
Practice has proven that achieving appropriately scaled agricultural operations can better improve land output rates, resource utilization rates and labor productivity, generating greater economies of scale. In recent years, all parts of China have been stepping up exploration of ways to achieve scaled agricultural operations. A relatively common situation is that when farmers go to work in cities themselves, they transfer the operating rights of their contracted land to others. On this basis, a group of relatively large-scale specialized major growers like Jia Weitao, family farm owners, and leaders of farmers' cooperatives have emerged. Under their dedicated management, agricultural production efficiency and returns have improved substantially.
All parts of the country are also continuously exploring more ways to achieve appropriately scaled agricultural operations. In some places, farmers are willing to adopt the approach of contributing land operating rights as equity to establish agricultural cooperatives with a land shareholding cooperative system, without transferring land operating rights, and they likewise achieve scaled development; in other places, land trusteeship is popular: farmers still go to work in cities, and the land is entrusted to agricultural socialized service organizations for management. This form also lowers the cost of agricultural production and improves returns.
Therefore, to develop various forms of appropriately scaled agricultural operations, efforts must be made on “various forms.” Chen Xiwen, deputy head of the Central Rural Work Leading Group and director of its office, pointed out that attention should be given to the entities and methods that achieve scaled operations by transferring land operating rights, and equal attention should also be given to those that achieve scaled operations through methods such as land equity contribution and land trusteeship.
The benefits of scaled agricultural operations are many, but one must never blindly seek excessive size. Some family farm owners and major growers, when objective conditions were not yet mature, took too large a step in transferring land, and this can easily lead to losses or even more serious operational risks. In this regard, the Plan particularly emphasizes the issue of grasping the “degree” of scaled operations. Experts say that the development of scaled operations is a gradual process and must not be divorced from reality or from national conditions, nor should there be a one-sided pursuit of transfer speed and oversized scale. Exactly how much counts as “appropriate” needs to be determined according to multiple factors such as regional characteristics, land conditions, crop varieties and productivity levels; it is bound to differ and is also dynamic.
Jia Weitao told reporters that farming 1600 mu of land does not require him to do everything personally: “The village has an agricultural machinery cooperative and a plant protection team. When the farming season comes, I just make a phone call and they come to provide services.” Developing various forms of appropriately scaled agricultural operations and building a modern agricultural operating system cannot be done without professional agricultural socialized service organizations. A sound agricultural socialized service system can free agricultural operating entities from part of the production and operation process, allowing them to focus on leveraging their own strengths, and it is a strong support for the development of appropriately scaled agricultural operations.
In recent years, China's agricultural socialized service system has continued to develop and grow, but it still cannot meet the development needs of the vast number of contracted farmers and new-type scaled agricultural operating entities. Therefore, this time the Plan once again deploys innovation in the agricultural socialized service mechanism, aiming to bring household farming onto the track of modern agricultural development through thoughtful and convenient socialized services, and proposes carrying out pilot innovation in mechanisms for the government to purchase public-benefit services from agricultural commercial service organizations.
To develop various forms of appropriately scaled agricultural operations, it is necessary not only to achieve an appropriate scale of land but also to cultivate operating entities suited to it. At present, these new-type agricultural operating entities have gradually become a vital force in modern agricultural development. To adapt to future development trends, the scale of this contingent still needs to continue expanding, and more young people and capable agricultural talents need to be attracted to return to their hometowns to farm.
Training a strong team of professional farmers is no easy task. “Our agricultural vocational education must keep up, and we must give play to the role of agricultural colleges and vocational colleges, adopting targeted approaches to train more and more new-type farmers who meet the needs of modern agricultural development. This is a very arduous task,” said Han Jun, deputy director of the Office of the Central Rural Work Leading Group.