What to Do When Farming Doesn't Pay? Professional Farmers Step In to Crack the Problem

"Most farming households in our rural areas now have just seven or eight mu of land, or a dozen mu; each household farms only this little bit of land, and the money earned from one mu of land is about the same as what you'd earn working in the city for a week." Han Jun, deputy director of the Office of the Central Rural Work Leading Group, said that how to make farming truly an attractive occupation, so that people engaged in agricultural production and operation can also live a decent life, is a major problem that must be solved in "three rural" policy. (Xinhua Net, November 4)

"A moderately prosperous society is judged by the wellbeing of rural residents. For China to be strong, agriculture must be strong; for China to be beautiful, rural areas must be beautiful; for China to be prosperous, farmers must be prosperous. By enriching farmers, improving farmers, and supporting farmers, we should make agricultural operations profitable, make agriculture a promising industry, make farming a respectable occupation, and make rural areas a beautiful homeland where people can live and work in peace and contentment." -- From the Central Rural Work Conference's proposal two years ago to "make farming a respectable occupation" to the clear statement in the Comprehensive Implementation Plan for Deepening Rural Reform to "train a new type of professional farmer workforce," the professionalization of farmers is undoubtedly a major trend against the backdrop of urbanization.

In the past, under the urban-rural dual system, farmers were constrained by the household registration barrier and had no choice but to endure the lowest public welfare and public services. But in essence, farmer should originally represent only an occupation; the only difference is that farmers plant fields and farm land, while chefs cook dishes and meals, and government officials serve the public... To make farming a respectable occupation, the first thing is to make farming and tilling the land profitable; otherwise, "professional farmer" would be closer to a helpless complaint.

Only when farmers leave the land can they become rich; this is the most vivid reality in rural areas today. "The income from a farmer farming 1 mu of land is about the same as one week of working in the city," putting the question of "who will farm the land in the future" on the table. On the one hand, Yuan Longping can enable farmers to achieve higher rice yields, but he cannot thereby enable farmers to have higher incomes; on the other hand, although we have many agricultural subsidies, farming still does not make money, and it seems the only way out is to work as a migrant laborer.

To enable farmers to become rich through the land and to earn money by growing grain, "developing various forms of appropriately scaled agricultural operations" is an unavoidable path. "If farming, you need to reach one or two hundred mu to have a decent income, possibly about the same as the income from working as a migrant laborer." This means that future professional farmers are actually more like modern "farm owners." At the same time, it is certain that modern agriculture will need fewer and fewer practitioners, more people will leave villages to settle in towns and cities, and "professional farmers" need to be separated from "status farmers."

Nowadays, when farmers are mentioned, it still seems to refer to a status, as opposed to workers, intellectuals, and so on; to solve the farmers' problem, farmers need to be reclassified as an occupation rather than a status. For this reason, it is necessary not only to close the gap in public welfare and achieve equalization of public services, but more importantly, to let land become the capital for farmers to change their status, just as urban residents who lived in public housing back then all obtained a huge income because of their houses -- according to Mr. Mao Yushi's calculation, each household got at least several hundred thousand yuan and at most over a million; in fact, for public housing placed under a family's name at an ultra-low price, if it had never been sold or demolished, the income would be far more than that.

How to create a reasonable connection between farmers' land in rural areas and the housing needed to settle in towns and cities, how to give farmers more property rights, and how to let farmers truly share in the appreciation gains from land -- this may be the key to "status farmers" exiting and "professional farmers" taking the stage.