Efficient Agriculture Calls for Socialized Services; Cooperatives Should Fulfill Their Service Function
Editor's note: To raise the output efficiency of agriculture, lower the cost of planting and breeding, and achieve professional and efficient operation in all links such as plowing, planting and harvesting, there is a growing call for the intervention of agricultural socialized services. Especially as China's agriculture continues to advance in scale, standardization and intensification, this has created a forcing pressure for accelerating the construction of an agricultural socialized service system. In the agricultural reclamation areas, quite a few groups or farms have set up specialized agricultural socialized service organizations and companies, which not only improved the efficiency of material use and spread out farmers' planting and breeding costs, but also improved the quality of agricultural products and increased farmers' incomes - truly achieving multiple gains at once. Right now, spring plowing has already begun, and agricultural socialized services are bound to show their full worth.
“With a professional team, we save worry and money”
It is planting time once again, and spring tides surge everywhere across the black soil under the Baoquanling Management Bureau of the Heilongjiang Reclamation Area. Men Zhenhai, a national major grain grower in the Heilongjiang Reclamation Area, has also become busy. Unlike previous years, this year Old Men is no longer farming “single-handedly” but is carrying out “group operations”; he has joined the Longfeng Rice Planting Agricultural Cooperative. From the very start of spring plowing preparations, they began “group buying” of agricultural materials, proactively contacting agricultural machinery manufacturers and agricultural input dealers to stock up on production materials at low cost and high quality. On the purchase of electric seeders, soil-covering machines and the like alone, they saved 210,000 yuan.
“Since we got a professional team like this service-oriented cooperative, we save both worry and money, and we have truly tasted the sweetness that agricultural socialized services bring us!”
Cooperatives should embody their service function
[Case]Zhang Wei, a grower at Suibin Farm, mainly grows corn. To rotate crops, he plants miscellaneous grains every year, but he could not earn much money. Later he joined a cooperative and signed a contract for 17 hectares of miscellaneous grain planting. Not only was the price guaranteed, but with the cooperative's services the sales problem was also solved, and he earned an annual net profit of 150,000 yuan.
In promoting cooperative development, Baoquanling focuses on cultivating cooperatives that can provide agricultural socialized services. It supports all kinds of capable people who understand production, can manage and can operate to establish and lead cooperatives, carrying out cooperative operations in land, technology, capital, agricultural machinery and equipment, and labor, and extending the cooperative organizations' business activities to the “two ends” of pre-production and post-production.
Wang Ziju, head of the Runfeng Agricultural Machinery Cooperative, is leading members in overhauling agricultural machinery and tools to prepare for this year's spring plowing production. Wang Ziju introduced that the cooperative intensively operates nearly 30,000 mu of cultivated land, with all kinds of agricultural machinery available. Through measures such as unified supply of agricultural materials and unified production management, members' production costs have dropped substantially, with an average income increase of 150 yuan per mu.
Mingshan Farm issued preferential policies, established a Chinese herbal medicine planting consortium for Schisandra chinensis and other herbs, and jointly operated with the Jiamusi Sanjiang Xinyuan Chinese Herbal Medicine Planting Professional Cooperative to provide whole-process services for growers. Jiangbin Farm, relying on industries such as planting, breeding and processing, established an economic consortium of “leading enterprise + base + farmer professional cooperative.” Before production, capable people at the base guide planting; during production, the cooperative provides field management services; after production, the leading enterprise handles harvesting and transport. Growers enjoy the benefits of whole-process socialized services.
Capable staff members with good sense have also set up service-oriented cooperatives one after another. For example, the Baihua Grain Business Cooperative organizes scattered small miscellaneous grain growers and provides whole-process follow-up services in links such as planting, processing, sales and branding, greatly reducing growers' production and operation costs and ensuring the maximization of growers' benefits.
Good services keep farmers from taking detours
[Case]Last September, the training class for demonstration leaders of farmers' professional cooperatives from the four eastern bureaus of the Heilongjiang Reclamation Area was held in Baoquanling. Relevant experts and scholars trained agricultural practitioners on content such as agricultural socialized services.
To improve the public service capacity of agricultural professional cooperatives, as well as cooperatives' management level and market development, Baoquanling bases itself on training new-type professional farmers, increases support and guidance for cooperatives, combines this with the national Sunshine Project training, implements national subsidy policies, formulates special training plans, and carries out training in industrial policy, market analysis and business management.
On March 11 this year, the Longfeng Cooperative at Suibin Farm, to raise farmers' rice planting level, invited rice experts to train everyone on rice varieties, agricultural techniques and more. In addition, it invited manufacturers of electric soil-covering seeders into the rice seedling greenhouses to demonstrate machinery operation on site, promoting the spread of new agricultural technology.
How to serve? What content to serve? Simply providing one-way services from top to bottom is inevitably thankless. Therefore, they carry out training services of “theoretical instruction + base practical training + platform exchange + follow-up effectiveness tracking.” According to different regions and different planting characteristics, growers are asked to “set the questions,” and then “menu-style” services are provided. They also introduce technology extension, teaching and research personnel to pair up with growers, bringing the most cutting-edge agricultural technology and information to the fields.
Now growers all give a thumbs-up and say: “Before, we only had half-understood knowledge and farmed by feel. Now the cooperative finds experts to train us; in the future we will certainly take fewer detours and save a great deal of time and energy.”
Serving farmers should embody a public-benefit character
[Case]In 2014, the Huiying Grain Planting Cooperative created the “Baoquanling Purchase and Sales Information Network” and built the “Baoquanling Purchase and Sales Information E-commerce Platform,” providing growers with services such as market information, technical services, supply-demand matching and product promotion, integrating the whole process of grain from planting to harvesting into the information service system.
“Setting up a cooperative is not just about gathering everyone together and calling it done; it must proactively take on more functions of socialized services. How to choose seeds - you have to provide selection services; how to prepare the land - you have to provide agricultural machinery operation services; once the crops grow - you have to provide unified prevention and control services... The public-benefit character of the cooperative's services must be brought out.” said Chen Huiying, head of the Huiying Cooperative.
The Huiying Grain Planting Cooperative provides farmers with various services and support throughout the whole process in links such as planting, storage and transport, processing and sales. Efficiency improved and benefits rose, and more than 20 kinds of miscellaneous grains immediately stood out in the market - all thanks to the professionalism and efficiency of agricultural socialized services.