How to solve the difficulty of drying grain? The cooperative has a clever solution
It is autumn harvest again, and the problem of “difficulty in drying grain” is once again placed before farmers. In order to dry grain, the roads have been draped in “golden armor”, which not only affects traffic but also poses relatively large safety hazards. What to do? Accelerating the construction of specialized agricultural cooperatives can be a way out.
Scene one: drying grain by day, sleeping by the roadside at night
In order to dry grain, farmers tried every means to enclose land and roads, and even placed stones, glass bottles and other obstacles to prevent vehicles from crushing the grain. As a result, roads that were not wide to begin with became crowded, and traffic accidents and pedestrians falling and getting injured occurred from time to time.
The situation of drying grain on roads also occurred this year. On November 2, a resident reported to the city convenience service hotline that the road surface of Shengyu Avenue in the New Materials Industrial Park was covered with rice being dried by people, affecting vehicle passage.
At noon on the 3rd, grain was being dried on 3 lanes of Shengyu Avenue, and the edges of the rice were separated off with sacks, isolation posts and red banners. From time to time, trucks drove past the farmers drying grain.
Mr. Shao is one of the farmers drying grain here. He had already been here drying grain for a week. Besides him, several other farming households along the road had “enclosed land” to dry grain, and many farmers on nearby roads were also drying grain.
He said everyone knew it was dangerous to dry grain on roads, but there was really no other way. The roads used for drying grain were found by the farmers themselves, basically roads with relatively little traffic, and the isolation posts used for warnings were borrowed from a nearby construction site. However, although everyone now had a place to dry grain, at the beginning they still had to “grab territory”, using sacks to “enclose land” on the road ten days to half a month in advance. Moreover, during those few days of drying grain, everyone ate and lived on the road. Right by the roadside, there was a tricycle with a tent set up on it and a quilt inside. Mr. Shao had been guarding the rice in the tent every night these past few days, on alert against anyone coming to steal the grain.
Scene two: dryers run nonstop at the professional station
On the morning of November 3, along Fengshou Road in Fanshen Village, Xieqiao Management District, rice fields stretched in patches, and golden rice ears nodded frequently in the breeze. Under the azure sky, a red-and-white Yanmar harvester shuttled back and forth in the fields. Under the skilled operation of the machine operator, the harvester was like an “electric clipper”, neatly giving the rice field a “crew cut”, and in the blink of an eye completed the harvesting and threshing of the entire patch of rice. The rice harvested by the harvester was unloaded directly onto a grain transport truck parked to the side, and then transported to the yard of the Fanshen Village agricultural machinery service professional station for drying.
Chen Weixing, a logistics service staff member at the professional station, introduced that what was being harvested was the rice field contracted by Wu Jianliang, a major grain-growing household in the village. He had contracted 572 mu of rice fields and had already harvested more than 100 mu, with the rice being dried while harvesting proceeded. The professional station was built last year. This year the village spent more than 100,000 yuan to purchase a dryer. This dryer can dry 5.5 tons of rice at a time, and these past few days it had been running 24 hours without stopping, having completed the drying operation for 130,000 jin of rice. Because the rice currently being harvested had a high moisture content, the drying time was long, requiring nearly 20 hours at a time.
Chen Weixing said that when farmers planted in scattered plots, each household managed its own small patch and dried grain on its own yard. After contracting the land to major grain-growing households, more than a million jin of rice could be harvested at one time, and there was not enough space to dry it, so after harvesting the rice was hauled to grain depots for drying. During peak periods, farmers waiting in line at the grain depots formed long queues, all crowded together, and there was not enough time to dry it. Now that the village had a dryer, part of the difficulty of drying grain had been alleviated, but the number of dryers was still insufficient, and it was hoped that a few more could be added.
Scene three: rice turned into milled rice through full mechanization
To alleviate the problem of drying grain by occupying roads, various towns and relevant departments in Changshu also adopted a series of measures combining blocking and guiding. For example, the traffic police squadrons of Meili Town and Haiyu Town not only opened their internal spaces year after year to serve farmers, but also contacted factories in their jurisdictions for farmers, freeing up enterprise vacant land for farmers to dry grain. These measures were once reported by this newspaper.
Providing space is one method, but as Chen Weixing said, if there were enough dryers to meet farmers' needs, would that not be even better? In this regard, the construction and development of the Yusheng Agricultural Products Professional Cooperative in Haiyu Town provided one line of thinking.
This cooperative was established on August 15, 2012. It was formed by Qifeng, Xiaoqiao and Zhengjiaqiao, three administrative villages in Haiyu Town, bringing together nearly more than 4,000 local farming households to “team up”, covering 12,000 mu of rice fields. It provided farmers in the region with unified procurement of production materials and grain storage services, built a rice deep-processing base, and carried out one-stop rice production, packaging and sales.
On the afternoon of November 3, rows of dryers at the cooperative were running with a “rumbling” sound. On the conveyor belt, dried rice was transferred from the dryers to the granary next door. General Manager Dou Xianglong said that the cooperative currently had 22 dryers, which could dry 250 tons of rice at a time and could complete the drying task for 500 mu of rice fields in one day. Starting from September 28, the cooperative had dried early rice in small batches. At present, all equipment was operating at full capacity. Rice that farmers put into drying on the afternoon of one day could be transferred into the granary by the next morning. Moreover, the rice entering the granary would within a short time enter the rice milling workshop and become snow-white milled rice to be packaged and sold. This entire series of processes was all mechanized.
Dou Xianglong said that the establishment of the cooperative solved the problems of farmers drying grain and collecting grain, and at the same time would effectively promote agricultural efficiency and increase farmers' income in the three villages.