What Are the Five Worries and Five Hopes of Farmers During the Autumn Sowing Season?
During the autumn sowing production season, the author found while visiting rural areas that farmers currently have “five worries and five hopes” regarding autumn sowing.
Worried about the “difficulty of selling” grain, hoping for market information to reach villages and households. Not knowing what to plant is a common confusion among farmers at present. This year's wheat is hard to sell and corn is unsalable, leaving farmers at a loss. In the past, they did not know what a market was, but no matter what they planted, it could be sold. Now they must face the market, but the market is like a baby's face, changing at a moment's notice. Poor information and the “difficulty of selling” grain mean that farmers increase production without increasing income. Nowadays many farmers are always troubled by choosing what kind of crop to plant. What should they plant to make money?
Farmers hope relevant departments can comprehensively analyze the demand situation for agricultural products, and hope market information can reach villages and households in a timely manner to help farmers get over this hurdle.
Worried that bringing science and technology to the countryside is just for show, hoping for science and technology services to reach the fields. Increasing the science and technology content of agricultural products and improving the quality of agricultural products is the key to raising the threshold for agricultural products. Farmers worry that relevant departments go through the motions and engage in formalism when bringing science and technology to the countryside, failing to play their due role.
The farming masses hope experts and technicians can go down to the fields to guide farmers in production and solve practical problems.
Worried about high prices of agricultural inputs, hoping for fair prices for agricultural inputs. In recent years, the prices of seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural inputs have risen year by year, greatly affecting farmers' investment in autumn sowing production.
Now farmers hope for stable prices and good quality in agricultural inputs, and call on the state to take effective measures, such as setting maximum selling prices, strengthening market regulation and agricultural input inspections, strictly limiting the market prices of chemical fertilizers, agricultural film, pesticides, seeds and other agricultural inputs and agricultural machinery operations, investigating and punishing counterfeit and inferior agricultural inputs, striving to keep agricultural input prices stable, and safeguarding farmers' interests.
Worried that straw cannot be handled, hoping to increase efforts to promote straw-returning technology. Since the ban on burning straw, because farmers cannot burn the straw they harvest themselves, have no storage place, and do not know how to comprehensively utilize it, they have no choice but to pile straw at the edges of fields and beside ditches, causing the phenomenon of straw polluting the environment to intensify day by day.
Farmers hope relevant functional departments will carry out training on comprehensive straw utilization, issue preferential measures for comprehensive straw utilization, and find a “good home” for crop straw.
Worried that policies will lose their flavor, hoping cadres will go down to the grassroots. In recent years, the Party's various policies benefiting the people in rural areas have allowed farmers to obtain real benefits, and farmers thank the Party and the government from the bottom of their hearts. But some departments are still doing things in disguised forms that harm farmers' interests, causing farmers' hidden burdens to rebound somewhat.
During the autumn planting and autumn sowing season, farmers hope the preferential policies in rural areas can remain stable for the long term, and hope leading cadres at all levels can strengthen the promotion of agricultural technology and service guidance, do a good job in technical training, promote industrial structure adjustment, increase information guidance services for agricultural products, settle down to take responsibility for villages, groups and households, and fight the battle of autumn planting and autumn sowing together with farmers.