Activating Modern Agricultural Concepts: Land Transfer Achieves High Efficiency

In recent years, riding the wave of land transfer, a large number of new-type agricultural business entities in our city have grown rapidly. However, after land is consolidated into scale, problems such as loose management, insufficient funds and inadequate investment in infrastructure remain the primary factors restricting agriculture from becoming bigger and stronger. How can the development bottleneck of "having the will but lacking the means" be broken?

Seek Funding to Avoid the "No Rice to Cook" Dilemma

On the morning of April 9, the reporter came to the Xijingbei Planting Cooperative in Yuhua District, where cooperative chairman Guo Huiyong was busy arranging asparagus planting in the greenhouse. Outside the greenhouse, the new planting base was basically completed, and the parent-child canteen and picking garden were also being built one after another. The more than 110 mu of land transferred to the cooperative has basically all been put into use.

Located in the suburbs with convenient transportation, the Xijingbei Planting Cooperative has inherent advantages. The base has already cooperated with dozens of households in surrounding communities, mainly developing order-based planting and delivery. "Whatever the subscribers want to eat, we plant it, and after harvesting we deliver it to the subscribers' homes at the first opportunity. The results are quite good."

Although business is booming, Guo Huiyong still has some concerns of his own. "Land transfer fees take up most of the funds. Now, upgrading some supporting facilities according to the original plan is a bit of a stretch." He introduced that the cooperative is applying to the bank for an agriculture-related loan, hoping to use external forces to achieve expanded reproduction.

Most of the people in Fengcun, Xing'an Town, Gaocheng District, are engaged in medicinal herb cultivation. In order to strengthen the industry, the village organized land transfer and established a cooperative. Everyone collectively planted and sold varieties of Saposhnikovia divaricata and Arisaema erubescens, and many members made money. Many surrounding villagers subsequently joined as well.

However, because they did not fully grasp the market in the past two years, the planting scale went up but prices fell. Farmers' enthusiasm for planting was dealt a blow, and a small number of farmers withdrew the land transferred to the cooperative. After joint discussion, the cooperative and farmers took the initiative to adjust, planting other medicinal herb varieties to reduce market risk.

Attracting Talent to Break the "Development Shortfall" in Management and Operations

The threshold for entering agriculture is low, but doing it well and meticulously is very difficult. The lack of professional talent and scientific management has become the "development shortfall" of many new-type agricultural cooperative organizations.

"With the cooperative's current technical capacity, we can only cultivate a single variety, the oyster mushroom. If we want to introduce pearl mushrooms and abalone mushrooms next, we must hire technical personnel from outside." said Wang Yinghai, chairman of Yan Kaibao Kang Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd. in Wuji County. The company's shareholders are basically mushroom farmers from the nearby Niuxinzhuang Village, and everyone is not familiar with new technologies and new varieties.

Opposite the mushroom production base, the new sterilization and fruiting rooms and intelligent temperature control systems have all been installed. "The supporting facilities are all ready. In order for the new varieties to grow normally, everyone still decided to hire experts from Shandong with high pay to provide guidance." In Wang Yinghai's view, mushroom cultivation is a technical job, especially considering factors such as season, market conditions and greenhouse utilization rate. With professional talent, management difficulty and production losses can be greatly reduced.

During the reporter's visits, some developing family farms, cooperatives and agricultural companies also encountered management problems and needed to "figure things out on their own." Under this relatively extensive development model, many new-type agricultural cooperative organizations began to actively seek paths suitable for their own development.

Xiaoliu Village in Xinle City has many specialized watermelon planting cooperatives. Han Guofeng, chairman of the Guofeng Watermelon Cooperative, believes that the village plants a large number and variety of watermelons, but for a long time there was no standardized production model, and they suffered considerable losses. "In the past, the seedlings that melon farmers received varied in quality. After they grew, each sold their own melons. When customers came, they picked and chose, which wasted energy." This year, melon farmers finally began to uniformly purchase seedlings and plant uniformly. Because the seedling quality is basically similar, customers who come to purchase are also very confident about the quality.

Exploring Paths to Cultivate More New-Type Professional Farmers

Can farmers' cooperative organizations develop healthily only after land transfer is consolidated into contiguous plots? "The key still lies in exploring a path suitable for the local area and suitable for the development of cooperative organizations." Hou Junqi of the Agricultural Economics Division of the Municipal Agriculture Bureau told the reporter that when farmers' cooperative organizations cannot solve their own development dilemmas, the government still needs to play a positive guiding role.

In recent years, the state, provinces and cities have issued a series of policies benefiting farmers, causing many people to blindly follow the trend, eager to strike gold in agriculture. However, if they lack understanding of the agricultural field they are engaged in, it will inevitably bring blindness in operations, cause poor connection with the sales market, prevent good products from selling at good prices, and dampen farmers' enthusiasm.

Hou Junqi said that on the one hand, the government should guide participants entering the agricultural market; on the other hand, it should greatly improve practitioners' management and technical levels. "It should not be limited to scientific planting, but should also involve management knowledge such as finance and logistics distribution, so that agricultural production becomes refined."

It is understood that in order to accelerate the cultivation of modern farmers, our city has not only established training bases for new-type professional farmers, but counties (cities) and districts have also successively carried out localized professional farmer training. In particular, large-scale planting and breeding households, family farm owners, heads of professional cooperatives and production personnel in facility agriculture parks are selected as key training targets, implementing dynamic access and exit management, and building a new-type professional farmer incubation system with a sound framework.