How Can Small-Scale Land Contracting Move Toward Large-Scale Management?
Land trusteeship is a model in which, while keeping farmers' land use rights unchanged, farmers' status as operating entities unchanged, and farmers' status as beneficiaries unchanged, new types of operating entities such as farmers' cooperatives and large grain growers, in accordance with farmers' requirements, exercise unified management and unified services over their contracted land. It is a good way to effectively solve the problems of “who will farm the land” and “how to farm the land”; it is a new form of combining unified and separate management under “small contracting and large-scale management”; and it is a replicable model generally welcomed by migrant workers who have moved to the cities and by farmers who remain in the countryside.
The Shuangfengshou Agricultural Machinery Professional Cooperative in Xiangyang City, Hubei Province, is precisely a pathfinder for this kind of “large-scale management without land ‘transfer’”. After five years of development, the cooperative now has 158 members and more than 160 units of advanced large-scale agricultural machinery of various types. Its machinery operation service area covers more than 30 townships in Xiangzhou District and Zaoyang City and Yicheng City of Xiangyang City, as well as Xinye County of Henan Province, across 4 counties (cities, districts) in two provinces. It has won honorary titles such as “National Demonstration Cooperative of Farmers' Professional Cooperatives” and “National Demonstration Cooperative of Agricultural Machinery Professional Cooperatives”. Most noteworthy is that they have explored and created a land trusteeship model, with a trusteeship area of more than 100,000 mu, covering 8 townships and 20,000 farming households in Hubei and Henan provinces, and have received unanimous support and widespread praise from local people, especially households that have gone out to work or do business with the whole family and elderly farmers who remain behind.
After conducting research, Wang Junzheng, member of the Standing Committee of the Hubei Provincial Party Committee and Secretary of the Xiangyang Municipal Party Committee, summed it up as follows: “The Shuangfengshou Agricultural Machinery Professional Cooperative in Xiangyang City, with agricultural machinery services as its foundation and land trusteeship as its means, has achieved large-scale management without transferring land, promoted the extension and application of agricultural science and technology, and achieved increased agricultural efficiency and increased farmers' income. This operating model is a new form of realizing the rural two-tier management system.”
Agricultural technology and agricultural machinery are the “two wheels of a cart and the two wings of a bird” in agricultural modernization, and farmers remaining in the countryside especially like this kind of “two-in-one” service.
Song Tao, chairman of the Shuangfengshou Agricultural Machinery Professional Cooperative, described his 13 years of experience serving farmers. The land trusteeship model he led in creating is divided into three methods and has gone through four stages.
It started with contract farming. Song Tao was originally an assistant agronomist at the agricultural technology station of Zhangjiazhen Town, Xiangzhou District. In 2002, he started his own business, leveraging his technical and service advantages to guide farmers in planting high-quality rice through improved seed promotion, technical guidance and contracted purchasing. During this period, he found that rice grown separately by individual households had high purchasing costs, made standards difficult to unify, and produced a low head rice rate after processing. He began to think about how to change household-by-household planting into unified planting by village or group, so as to achieve standardization and large-scale production of high-quality rice and improve grain quality.
It sprouted from the promotion of agricultural machinery. In 2008, while visiting the countryside, Song Tao met a farmer named Zhou Mingjiang who was transplanting rice seedlings. Zhou was old and in poor health and could not bend at the waist, so he had to crawl in the muddy water, transplanting one spot and then moving along. This scene deeply stung Song Tao as an agricultural technology worker: now that all the young and middle-aged adults had gone to work in the cities, the elderly could not farm the land. Could mechanical services be provided in addition to agricultural technology for farmers who farm?
Good intentions find help from heaven. At that time, the Xiangzhou District Agricultural Mechanization Office was carrying out pilot demonstrations in some places to promote machinery and technology for mechanical rice transplanting, so Song Tao actively joined in. He mobilized 7 farmers to jointly purchase large rotary tillers, rice transplanters, harvesters and other equipment, forming a small team to serve farmers. They first conducted standardized planting experiments and mechanical transplanting demonstrations in 400 mu of paddy field in Group 3 of Zhoudang Village, adopting unified seed supply, unified seedling raising, unified fertilization and unified mechanical transplanting, carrying out mechanized operations in the seedling raising and transplanting stages, and collecting service fees by the method of “eat the noodles first and pay the bill later”, charging farming households after the grain was purchased in a unified way. Farmers were very willing to accept this production method, which saves worry, effort, labor and money. After the autumn harvest that year, when each household did the accounts, the 400 mu of experimental land had increased production by more than 150 jin per mu on average, and after mechanical harvesting and processing of the rice, the head rice rate had also increased by nearly 10 percentage points.
From this, Song Tao realized that farmers remaining in the countryside especially welcomed the “two-in-one” service of agricultural technology plus agricultural machinery. Agricultural technology and agricultural machinery are the “two wheels of a cart and the two wings of a bird” in agricultural modernization, and the large-scale and standardized development of agricultural production must be combined with mechanization in order to be better realized. During the promotion of mechanized rice transplanting, one incident occurred. That day, they had arranged to transplant rice seedlings for Song Shuicheng, a farmer in his 50s. The rice transplanter had arrived at the field edge, but Song Shuicheng's field had not yet been prepared. He used his own small agricultural machinery to prepare the field, but no matter how he did it, it could not meet the standard for mechanical transplanting, delaying them by more than half a day, and both Song Tao and Song Shuicheng were anxious. Song Shuicheng said: “How nice it would be if from now on the field preparation and rice transplanting were all handed over to you to handle. You could set a suitable price and take care of the whole production process, so that we households would not have to worry and labor.”
Song Shuicheng's words lit up Song Tao's mind, and he began to consider expanding the scope of agricultural machinery services to provide services for the entire production process of farmers, or, according to farmers' different needs, to “half-package” or “fully package” farmers' production stages, just like running a restaurant, cooking several dishes suited to farmers' tastes so that farmers could order whatever they wanted.
It took shape in three methods. Zhou Mingjiang was one of the first farming households to enjoy “menu-style service”. In 2009, he signed with Song Tao for semi-trusteeship services such as land preparation, wheat harvesting and rice transplanting.
“Semi-trusteeship of the land saves both money and effort.” Zhou Mingjiang did the accounts: according to the trusteeship agreement, mechanical rice transplanting was charged at 80 yuan per mu. If hired labor were used for transplanting, 2 people would need a full day to finish transplanting, and wages of 160 yuan would have to be paid; adding expenses for meals, cigarettes and liquor, each mu of land would need at least 200 yuan. “When you add it up, for 15 mu of rice, nearly two thousand yuan was saved!”
That year, the area of mechanized rice services under agreement with Song Tao grew to 1,800 mu, of which Zhoudang Village alone expanded to 1,000 mu. According to the needs of agricultural production, Song Tao arranged services by production stage and established a mechanical land preparation service team, a mechanical harvesting service team, a mechanical transplanting service team, a mechanical pest control service team and a purchasing service team. At the same time, clear fixed prices for services were announced to the public: land preparation 15 yuan/mu, field preparation 30 yuan/mu, seedling raising 120 yuan/mu, rice transplanting 60 yuan/mu, field management 60 yuan/mu, mechanical harvesting 50 yuan/mu.