Facility agriculture's transition toward standardization still faces development obstacles
Recently, the 3rd China (Beijing) International Facility Agriculture and Horticultural Materials Exhibition was held. In addition to many well-known domestic companies exhibiting, advanced technologies and products from countries such as Austria, Turkey, the Netherlands, and Italy also appeared at this year's exhibition. The reporter found during visits that relevant research institutions and enterprises came to visit in “groups,” and quite a few agricultural cooperatives and even individuals also came to take a look.
In recent years, the development momentum of facility agriculture in China has been truly rapid. Facility agriculture has not only made an indispensable contribution to easing the imbalance between supply and demand of “vegetable basket” products, but is also an important way to boost employment and help farmers get rich.
But while China's facility agriculture has made considerable progress, it also faces obstacles to industrial development. Industry experts, in an interview with a China Science Daily reporter, said that China's protected horticulture agriculture should forge its own distinctive path, and that resource conservation, environmental friendliness, and quality safety are the fundamental way forward for development.
Both a “vegetable basket” and a “money bag”
The concept of facility agriculture covers protected cultivation and facility breeding. China is a major facility agriculture production country; in terms of area and output, China's facility agriculture ranks first in the world.
The “National Facility Agriculture Development ‘Twelfth Five-Year’ Plan (2011-2015)” released in 2011 shows that in 2010 China's horticultural facility area exceeded 3.5 million hectares; the large-scale breeding proportions of hogs, laying hens, broiler chickens, dairy cattle, and beef cattle reached 64.5%, 78.8%, 85.7%, 46.5%, and 41.6% respectively; among facility aquaculture, the total scale of marine and freshwater aquaculture had already reached 1.56 million hectares and 43.58 million cubic meters. Among these, facility vegetables were the largest in scale.
With the development of facility agriculture in China, its scale has continued to expand. At the same time, output and benefits have also been rising.
Taking the development of facility vegetables as an example, in the 1980s the supply of vegetables in early spring and late autumn basically improved, and in the 1990s the contradiction between supply and demand in the two off-seasons of winter-spring and summer-autumn was eased, satisfying consumers' demand to “eat summer vegetables in winter, winter vegetables in summer, western vegetables in the central region, and southern vegetables in the north.” The latest data show that in 2014 facility vegetable output was about 263 million tons, accounting for about 32.3% of total vegetable and melon output that year; per capita availability of facility vegetables and melons reached about 190 kg.
It can be said that the development of the facility vegetable industry has effectively eased the contradiction of supply and demand imbalance in China's “vegetable basket” products, becoming one of the most effective means for China to guarantee vegetable market supply. Xue Liang, president of the China Vegetable Association, once said, “At present, the national annual vegetable output is 700 million yuan, among which the contribution of facility agriculture is indispensable.”
At the same time, facility agriculture is also an effective way for farmers to increase income. It is reported that the national facility vegetable industry can provide employment for 25.8 million people, create about 15 million jobs, and drive the development of related industries such as greenhouse building materials, agricultural film, and transportation. In 2014, the output value of facility vegetables exceeded 1 trillion yuan, with a net output value of 614.606 billion yuan, increasing the per capita income of rural residents nationwide by 993.45 yuan.
Facility agriculture development faces obstacles
Undoubtedly, facility agriculture has played an extremely important role in safeguarding the “vegetable basket” and filling the “money bag.” However, behind the large-scale development of facility agriculture, there are also numerous obstacles.
“The characteristics of China's facility agriculture are very obvious: plastic film is used as the covering material, and large sheds and solar greenhouses are the mainstay.” Professor Zou Zhirong of Northwest A&F University said in an interview with a China Science Daily reporter.
According to statistics, in 1998 China's vegetable protected horticulture area was 20.84 million mu, of which small arch sheds and medium-large sheds accounted for 16.04 million mu; in 2004, China's vegetable protected horticulture area grew to 38.66 million mu, with small arch sheds and medium-large sheds accounting for 30.83 million mu; by 2014, China's vegetable protected horticulture area was 57.93 million mu, with small arch sheds and medium-large sheds accounting for 42.72 million mu.
Compared with the “absolute dominance” of small arch sheds and medium-large sheds, during the decade from 2004 to 2014, the area of heated greenhouses increased only from 220,000 mu to 250,000 mu, and the area of multi-span greenhouses increased from 110,000 mu to 440,000 mu.
Most of these small arch sheds and medium-large sheds have simple functions; the vast majority have only basic functions such as wind protection, heat preservation, and rain protection, and their ability to regulate microclimate environments such as temperature, light, and moisture is relatively poor. Correspondingly, their ability to resist natural disasters is also relatively poor, especially in winter and spring, posing great hidden dangers to production safety.
For example, in 2008, ice and snow disasters in the south damaged more than 600,000 mu of sheds, with a loss of 9.04 million tons of vegetables; in 2009, rain and snow disasters in the north damaged 880,000 mu of greenhouses and sheds, with a loss of 2.13 million tons of vegetables.
For a long time, Chinese agriculture has sought “high output” through “high input,” and this approach is especially evident in facility agriculture. In pursuit of output, some facility agriculture production blindly applies chemical fertilizers, which not only causes waste of resources and forms non-point source pollution, but also threatens the safety of agricultural products. Continuous cropping has also become a bottleneck affecting the sustainable and efficient use of soil resources in China's facility agriculture. At the same time, due to reasons such as large temperature differences and high humidity inside sheds, pests and diseases are also very likely to occur in large sheds and greenhouses.