What exactly makes the senior professional farmer certification so advanced?
Shaanxi is a pilot province advancing new professional farmer training on a whole-province basis, and last year it confirmed 84 senior professional farmers. That looks like fewer than 100, a bit on the low side, but in reality the standard is very hard to meet. What counts as senior? There are two hard requirements: first, an agricultural college diploma; second, an income 20 times that of local farmers. The first requirement is relatively easier to pass; for farmers with a certain educational foundation who are willing to learn, it is not hard to achieve. The key is the second requirement. Making money in agriculture is not easy to begin with, and one must also earn 20 times what others do. How easy can that be!
While interviewing in Hanzhong, the reporter was lucky enough to meet two senior professional farmers right away. One was Xia Tingqing, a skilled citrus grower in Baimiao Village, Hanwang Town, Hantai District, Hanzhong City; the other was Yu Chao, a skilled understory breeder in Chenggu County. The former, convinced that growing citrus could bring prosperity, threw himself into Hanzhong Vocational and Technical College. Besides learning citrus cultivation, especially fine management techniques, from Teacher Zhang Shunyu, who has rich experience in fruit tree specialty, he also paid attention to mastering knowledge of marketing, logistics and more. While earning his college diploma, he also solidly gained a thorough command of citrus cultivation and agricultural product distribution. When local citrus yields were around 10,000 jin per mu, Xia Tingqing far exceeded that, sometimes doubling it to 20,000 jin. All 13 mu of his land were planted with citrus, with an annual income of 160,000 to 170,000 yuan. Adding business related to citrus, such as agricultural input supply and citrus distribution, his annual income reached more than 300,000 yuan. The latter was even more impressive. With a background from Hanzhong Normal College, after studying knowledge of agricultural product cultivation and breeding, his confidence soared. He contracted 2,000 mu of forest land and planted it uniformly with ginkgo trees, raising ecological chickens under the forest with corn, cordyceps and other feed. Each year he raised about 80,000 free-range native chickens and raised and sold 120,000 high-grade Heihe black-boned chickens. Raising native chickens maintained simple reproduction, while the money came mainly from the Heihe black-boned chickens, which sold for 135 yuan each, amounting to 1.6 to 1.7 million yuan a year. This spring, he also planned to open an ecological restaurant in the forest land, letting guests enjoy the forest scenery while tasting purely understory-grown and raised products. While actually fattening his wallet, it was also the most powerful brand promotion for his own organic products. Developing along this trajectory, plus income after the trees mature, would be enormous!
Cultivating new-type professional farmers is a long-term systematic project focused on cultivating new main forces for modern agricultural development, grounded in the present and looking to the long term. As training institutions, while providing farmers with technical and skills training, they should pay even more attention to cultivating their comprehensive qualities. In course design, teaching content and individualized instruction, they should be more targeted, flexible and differentiated. As those being trained, they should clearly understand what knowledge and skills they most need to learn and master, and use that knowledge and skills, like Xia Tingqing and Yu Chao, to earn plenty of solid, real money, rather than being satisfied with just obtaining a diploma.
It should be said that Shaanxi's certification of senior professional farmers is absolutely not about hyping a concept, but about hoping to set up a benchmark, so that training institutions have goals for their work and make efforts to find ways to cultivate more senior professional farmers; and so that those being trained have role models to learn from, aim high and are not content with the status quo. As senior professional farmers continue to emerge, the confidence and drive of training institutions will grow greater and greater, and the learning atmosphere among those being trained will become stronger and their initiative higher, forming a virtuous cycle. Seen in this way, Shaanxi's launch of senior professional farmer certification is indeed a clever move. General Secretary Xi and other central leaders attach great importance to the work of “agriculture, rural areas and farmers”, and pay special attention to who will farm the land in the future. In this sense, the cultivation of new professional farmers, which bears on the future development of the “agriculture, rural areas and farmers” cause, has a heavy responsibility and a long road ahead.