How should the professionalization of agricultural production be advanced?

The season is right in autumn, and it is also the time of year for harvesting and settling accounts in agriculture. The harvest in the fields and the farmers' income have once again become numbers that many people worry over endlessly and hold close to their hearts. As the agricultural workforce and the grain planting area both continue to shrink, how to raise land output, resource use efficiency and labor productivity, and how to let limited land feed a growing population, is no easy topic. Of all needs, grain comes first; of all industries, agriculture comes first. As the agricultural population moves to cities on a large scale, agricultural production based on the family unit is gradually declining. The agricultural economy can only seek efficiency from farmers' quality, from the degree of agricultural industrialization and intensification, and from the professionalization of agricultural production.

The professionalization of agricultural production means, first of all, the professionalization of farmers. Farmers' professional qualities roughly include three aspects, namely cultural and technical quality, management ability, and ideological and moral standards. In reality, the generally low quality of farmers themselves is a huge obstacle facing the professionalization of farmers today. A survey by the Ministry of Agriculture shows that the age of China's agricultural labor force is mainly concentrated above 40, accounting for 75.9% of all people engaged in agricultural production, with an average age approaching 50, and in some areas even above 55, and their quality is worrying. The vast majority of the post-90s generation in rural areas have not engaged in agricultural production, nor do they have the skills or interest for it, and agriculture lacks successors. The 2012 No. 1 Central Document proposed for the first time "vigorously cultivating new-type professional farmers." What exactly is a professional farmer? Senior agricultural expert Zhang Xiaoshan once said that, unlike traditional farmers, new-type professional farmers are not only producers, but also investors, managers and decision-makers, and at the same time bearers of market risks and natural risks. To put it plainly, new-type professional farmers are farmers who are educated, understand technology and know how to run a business, who take farming as their lifelong profession, and who have successors. The advantages of new-type professional farmers are self-evident; the key is how to guide qualified rural labor to become professional farmers. On the one hand, it is necessary to establish and improve a professional farmer cultivation system and create a favorable development environment for them. On the other hand, it is necessary to increase grain-growing subsidies, provide technical support and professional training, improve social management and the rural financial system, ensure that their income is higher than that of working away from home, and at the same time attract highly educated people to engage in agricultural production, so that more high-quality talent becomes professional farmers.

When a farmer changes from a kind of identity to a kind of profession, the level of farmers' professionalization will directly affect the development process of the agricultural industry. It can be said that without the professionalization of farmers, there would be no industrialization of agriculture and no modernization of agriculture. With the rapid advance of industrialization and urbanization, the current development of agriculture has entered the stage of accelerating the building of a new agricultural management system. This stage-level change has shown such characteristics as rising comprehensive costs of agricultural production, prominent structural contradictions in the supply and demand of agricultural products, changeability in the rural social structure, and accelerated integration of urban and rural development. As the rural population flows to cities on a large scale, the question of who will engage in agricultural production begins to confront directly the contradiction between the small-peasant economy and the large market. The professionalization of farmers not only solves the future problem of "who will farm the land," but also answers the question of "how to farm the land." At the same time, the emergence of new agricultural management entities has also promoted the specialization, intensification, marketization and socialization of services in agricultural production, while the continuous improvement in the degree of agricultural industrialization and intensification has reduced the production costs of agricultural products, raised land output, and provided a certain guarantee for the safety of the quantity and quality of agricultural products.

The professionalization of farmers and the modernization of agriculture are a process of mutual interaction. When the household contract responsibility system becomes difficult to sustain under the new situation, "farm-style" management becomes an important mode of operation in the period of agricultural modernization, and the large-scale and intensive management of land also gives agricultural professional technology room to be applied. What can be certain is that in the process of developing from traditional agriculture to modern agriculture, the group of professional farmers will become the driving force and support for the development of modern agriculture, and will also become an important promoter of the professionalization of agricultural production.