Why has the manor economy become a new trend in future agricultural development?
A modern agricultural manor is a place that integrates agricultural production, agricultural product consumption, and vacation leisure tourism. In recent years, with rapid economic development and the relaxation of rural land policies, some commercial capital has begun turning to rural areas in search of new investment opportunities, while the rise of the middle class has raised demands for the quality of agricultural leisure tourism. After years of development, rural leisure tourism has also shifted from the original spontaneous low-level repetitive development, farmer self-operation, backward service facilities, and monotonous leisure tourism products to standardized guidance, market regulation, scale improvement, and ecological upgrading, and the modern agricultural manor economy has emerged as the times require.
A manor has its specific functions. The development of agricultural manors has eased the contradiction between supply and demand of funds needed in the process of agricultural development and formed a positive interaction with new urbanization construction and beautiful countryside construction. A manor also has its unique qualities. Modern agricultural manors have developed in a specialized and comprehensive direction, have relatively perfectly combined agriculture, leisure, and tourism, and have acquired the characteristics of an industrial economy. Their features are as follows: the development of manors tends toward intensive scale and comprehensiveness, manor quality tends toward refinement and distinctiveness, manor planning and design are expressed as creativity, the setting of manor projects is leisure-oriented, and manor operation is exclusive. Based on the elements, directions, and market types in modern manor development, modern manors can be divided into five major types: leisure dining, leisure sports, leisure experience, leisure wellness, and business.
Although the manor economy model is the trend of future agricultural development, there are still some common problems in the current development process: First, the agricultural manor itself is a slow and weak industry. As a relatively new business format, an agricultural manor needs to aim at profitability, but the industrial characteristics of agriculture are a long investment period, slow cost recovery, and high crisis risk; second, the operation methods of agricultural manors are backward. Because an agricultural manor is different from an ordinary agricultural project, it must adopt modern enterprise management methods, but some manors still operate by means of agricultural production and operation, encountering many difficulties and low efficiency; third, the internal operating mechanism of agricultural manors is immature. Due to information asymmetry between investors and developers, capital chains often break, causing investors to suffer losses; fourth, the government is lax in approval and supervision. In a certain period, manor construction investments in various places were numerous and large in scale, and individual local governments relaxed review conditions, causing "agricultural manors" to lose their original character and become real estate development projects. At the same time, due to inadequate supervision in the operation of agricultural manors, objectively leaving room for problems such as illegal fundraising, counter-leasing and subcontracting, and damage to the rights and interests of farmers and investors; fifth, no long-term plan has been formulated. Manor projects merely superficially copy some foreign examples, or copy them in disguised forms, without well integrating local elements. The projects are also unattractive; they are more like farms than manors. Without long-term systematic planning, it is difficult to form one's own brand and keep up with the requirements of the times.
Under the new normal, the development of manors has entered a healthy state, has attracted attention from all social strata and been enthusiastically pursued by mid-to-high-end people, and is still continuously heating up. Driven by China's recent favorable policies for agriculture, rural areas, and farmers and the era of leisure, different types of manors will constantly be created in beautiful countryside construction, and their scale, investment, construction style, operation model, operation content, audience, and many other aspects will increasingly be improved, and they will inevitably move toward modern leisure life. At the same time, the future development of manors also puts forward higher and newer era requirements for manor planning and design, manor services, manor operation and management, and manor investment and financing. For example, the professional requirements for planning and design will become higher and higher; the humanized requirements for manor services will receive more and more attention; manor operation and management will become more and more precise; and manor investment and financing channels will become more open.