How Large a Farming Scale Counts as Moderate Operation?

Although family farms, specialized cooperatives and other new types of agricultural business entities have gradually gained momentum, Zhang Baohua, a farmer in Zhangqiu City, has this year sharply reduced the area he devotes to grain cultivation. Just how large an area the new types of agricultural business entities should operate to count as “moderate” is a question worth pondering.

If the area is small

Does producing more grain mean earning more money?

Zhang Baohua is 64 years old this year and is a major grain grower in Taiping Village, Xiuhui Town, Zhangqiu. This year he planted 182 mu of wheat. Starting in 2000, he contracted land from nearby villagers who had gone out to work and were unwilling to farm it, and in 2013 he expanded his contracted land to 670 mu, involving 5 surrounding natural villages: because the scale was too large, he simply had no time to attend to it himself and needed to hire a great deal of labor. Without subsidies, he could not make much money.

After the 2013 No. 1 Central Document encouraged the development of new agricultural entities, Zhang Baohua, regarded by villagers as “shrewd”, smoothly obtained the provincial subsidy of 230 yuan per mu for major grain growers, totaling more than 100,000 yuan, but after the scale grew, the per-mu yield did not rise but instead fell.

“In the past, when the scale was small, the wheat yield per mu could reach 900 jin and the corn yield per mu could reach 1,100 jin, but in the past two years, of the more than 670 mu he has operated, only some of the better-managed plots reached or exceeded this standard, while the yields on the rest were very low because management was not up to par.” Zhang Baohua said.

Zhang Baohua himself is also reflecting. He uses the phrase “limit degree” to describe the change in land scale and output, “It looks as if the land being farmed is less, but the yield can increase. With my current more than 100 mu, I can make a profit of 500 yuan per mu, whereas before it was only 200 yuan, 300 yuan, or even lower.”

How large a scale of farmland operation

counts as “moderate”?

When it comes to Zhang Baohua's farming, many people in the village “have some objections”.

“It is not appropriate for him to transfer and farm land on such a large scale. The land is not well farmed, and it is also not conducive to the country producing more grain.” One villager said, “Last year one of his fields was all weeds, and watering could not keep up either. Some people even cursed him for wasting good land.”

Taiping Village has a total of 480 households and 1,789 people, with a cultivated land area of 1,060 mu, about 0.6 mu per capita. Gao Hengbin, secretary of the Party branch of Taiping Village, said that because it is not far from Zhangqiu and Jinan, the village has transferred out a relatively large labor force. At present, land in the village cultivated by individual households accounts for about 40%, with small-scale transfers of within 100 mu and those exceeding 100 mu each accounting for 30%.

Shi Chuanhai is one of those individual households. The 2.5 mu he farms had a bumper harvest last year, with the combined wheat and corn grain yield reaching 2,400 jin per mu; the 40 mu contracted and operated by the village collective also had a yield of 2,000 jin per mu; the 670 mu contracted by Zhang Baohua had the lowest yield, only 1,800 jin.

Gao Hengbin did a calculation for the reporter: whether it is 40 mu or 670 mu, transfer fees are rising year after year, having gone from 300 to 500 yuan per mu a couple of years ago to 700 or 800 yuan or even 1,000 yuan now. After scaled operation, agricultural input costs and harvest costs are lower than those of individual households, “for example, for mechanical plowing, mechanical harvesting and chemical fertilizer, each mu can be 10 or 20 yuan cheaper”. But correspondingly, the larger the scale, the higher the hired labor costs.

Among the major growers with more than 1,000 mu of grain-growing area that the reporter has tracked over the long term, those purely growing grain crops are rare. A major grower in Gaomi City, Shandong, has contracted land for more than 20 years and now operates 3,800 mu of land, including 2,000 mu of field crops and 1,800 mu of vegetables. “I count as experienced. One mu of field crops can earn only 100 yuan or 200 yuan a year, and in drought or flood it is impossible to make money at all. The money is mainly made from vegetables, and grain is used for crop rotation.”

Experts say that large-scale agriculture finds it very difficult to achieve flexible and fine agricultural production management. For example, when labor is hired, production efficiency will decline, and supervision also becomes a problem. In places such as Songjiang in Shanghai and Cixi in Zhejiang, where exploration of grain-growing family farms has been relatively successful, the cultivated land area is also mostly around 100 mu.

Support subsidies

Should they be tilted toward which farmers?

He Xuefeng, a professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, said that individuals or enterprises that rent land at high rents to carry out scaled agricultural operations have thin profits and high risks because of the high rents and large scale.

In He Xuefeng's view, most regions of our country are densely populated and the per capita cultivated land area is small. On the one hand, the level of urbanization is not yet high, and the transfer of labor to the secondary and tertiary industries is not stable. “In order to ensure farmers' opportunity to return home, large-scale land transfer is not suitable.”

Liu Tongli, former deputy director of the Agricultural Work Office of the Shandong Provincial Party Committee, said that family farms that hire little or no labor should be vigorously developed. A scale of from more than 10 mu to 100 mu is more suitable for national conditions, allowing the grain-growing returns obtained by farm households to be higher than or equal to the “opportunity cost” of going out to work, while also avoiding the risk that farmers invest too much and find it hard to withstand uncontrollable factors such as drought and flood.

Some experts believe that in the current agricultural support policies, newly added subsidies should be used to carefully select support recipients, and subsidies should be used for moderate-scale new entities to encourage more grain production and ensure food security. The government should focus its main energy on solving the basic conditions for agricultural production and making grain growing more convenient, improving infrastructure, and perfecting socialized services.