How can our country's protected agriculture industry develop? Experts offer diagnosis and suggestions
From July 7 to 9, the Planning and Design Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and the Protected Agriculture Branch of the China Agricultural Mechanization Association held in Beijing the 2015 Protected Agriculture Technology and Equipment Training Course and Joint Conference on Protected Agriculture.
Experts at the meeting believed that in recent years our country's protected agriculture industry has achieved considerable development, becoming an important means of adjusting the agricultural industrial structure, absorbing farmers for local employment, and promoting farmers' income growth. In 2014, the area of greenhouse facilities in our country reached 4.109 million hectares, including 1.013 million hectares of solar greenhouses, 1.875 million hectares of plastic tunnels (including medium tunnels), and 70,100 hectares of multi-span greenhouses with a relatively high level of environmental regulation.
Experts pointed out that, on the whole, our country's protected agriculture is large but not strong, and has problems including a structure that needs optimization and low total factor productivity; insufficient environmental regulation capacity and weak disaster resistance; low degree of mechanization and low labor productivity; and extensive production management and a low level of ecological sustainability. It must actively adapt to the new normal of development and accelerate transformation and upgrading.
Experts suggested that in the future the development of our country's protected agriculture should adapt to the new requirements of land policy and the new orientation of policy support, and strictly control non-agriculturalization; focus on improving the overall efficiency of the industry through integration and improvement of the industrial chain, and abandon the model of extensive growth achieved by increasing resource factors; plan model innovation and extension of the industrial chain, realize technological innovation, variety innovation, and equipment innovation, break through the efficiency bottleneck, and improve the enterprise-level benefits of solar greenhouses and plastic tunnels and the investment returns of multi-span greenhouses; improve the technical standard system, market constraint system, and industry self-discipline system, and jointly maintain good market order; keep closely in touch with the pulse of science and technology, strengthen collaborative innovation, and share the scientific and technological achievements of other social sectors, so that greenhouse labor is easier, greenhouse production is more efficient, and greenhouse products become standard commodities with higher added value; improve the service concept, so that equipment producers think more about how to build a good greenhouse, greenhouse builders think more about how to grow good products, and greenhouse growers think more about how to let people eat comfortably and with confidence; increase the strength of protected horticulture science and technology personnel in public-interest technology extension departments, and through market-based means establish a socialized technical extension service system with clear levels, division of labor and cooperation, in-place extension, timely service, and full vitality.