Growing Grain Can Be Profitable Too: A Large-Scale Grain Farmer Shares His Tips for Boosting Income

“Everyone says growing grain does not make money, but last year I made a net profit of five or six hundred yuan per mu!” Taking stock of the harvest at year's end, Yu Jialong, the only national-level large-scale grain farmer in Suqian City, Jiangsu Province last year, was beaming with joy.

Yu Jialong is 45 years old and lives in Nandatan Village, Gaodu Town, Siyang County, Jiangsu Province. “Growing grain means relying on the weather for your livelihood. Compared with rising costs, the increases in yield and price are limited, so making money really is not easy.” Speaking about why he can make money growing grain, Yu Jialong laid out his one, two, three points.

Willing to invest in farm machinery, doing the less urgent farm work himself

When we met Yu Jialong, he was driving an excavator to level the land in the fields. From morning to noon, he had already leveled more than 10 mu of land.

Jumping down from the excavator, Yu Jialong said that only by being willing to invest and willing to put in effort can you make money. If you rely on hiring people for everything, how could you still make so much money?

Yu Jialong did the math: from land preparation, sowing, and transplanting to weeding, fertilizing, and harvesting, if he hired help for all of it, each person would cost 80 yuan a day in wages. Therefore, for farm work that was not urgent, Yu Jialong did it all himself, saving a considerable amount of expense. Yu Jialong joked that this is called working for yourself to “earn money.”

But with more than 1000 mu of land, how could he get it all done by physical labor alone? In the past two years, Yu Jialong spent 1.1 million yuan on machinery alone, buying 12 pieces of various farm machines, including tractors, combine harvesters, and rice transplanters.

“Buying farm machinery is also about working for yourself to make money.” Yu Jialong said that if he used other people's machines for everything, the cost would be much greater. The year before last, Yu Jialong transplanted more than 700 mu of rice, and the transplanting alone cost 130 yuan per mu. Last year he bought his own rice transplanter, and the cost was only 40 yuan per mu.

Knowing how to grow is not enough; you must also know how to sell. Deep processing brings in 1.7 times more per mu

Yu Jialong put his mind to how to make more money growing grain: rice at 50 yuan per jin may fetch a high price, but after all, few people can afford to eat it. If you want to make more money growing grain, you must not only choose high-yield, disease-resistant varieties, but also choose varieties that the public likes and that have excellent quality, so they are easier to sell.

In 2014, Yu Jialong chose Nanjing 9108 rice, which has a very good reputation in Jiangsu, as his main variety, pairing it with high-quality japonica rice such as Ningjing 9 and Jindao 263 to spread risk. Facts proved that Yu Jialong's choice was right. The Nanjing 9108 he grew fetched as much as 3.20 yuan per kg of paddy, 0.50 yuan higher than ordinary paddy, selling for more than 300 yuan extra per mu.

“Knowing how to sell makes more money than knowing how to grow.” Seeing how well Nanjing 9108 sold, Yu Jialong turned his mind to deep processing and small-package sales. In mid-November last year, he took all of his Nanjing 9108 paddy to a nearby rice mill for processing, vacuum-packed it in two specifications, 5 kg and 10 kg, and registered the trademark “Sishui Mingzhu.” The 5 kg pack sold for 68 yuan and sold well in Shanghai, Suzhou, and other places. “If I just sold paddy, each mu would bring only 1958 yuan; but after processing it is different. At 70 kg of rice milled from every 100 kg of paddy, after deep processing each mu can sell for more than 5460 yuan, an increase of more than 1.7 times.”

Growing grain must also keep up with the times; ecological cultivation offers more security

Some people say that using chemical fertilizers to grow crops saves money and labor and gives high yields. Yu Jialong does not fully agree: “Nowadays people care about health, environmental protection, and safety in their lives. Growing grain must also follow the times. Although ecological cultivation takes more trouble and effort, the grain quality is good, the price is high, and making money is more secure.”

After the rice and wheat harvest, Yu Jialong used a straw return machine to plow all the straw back into the soil. “The straw from one mu of rice and wheat is equivalent to the nutrients of 4 bags of ammonium bicarbonate, 2 bags of phosphate fertilizer, and 24 kg of potassium fertilizer, which can save about 260 yuan in fertilizer expenses.” Yu Jialong said that returning straw to the field, combined with the use of organic fertilizer, increases soil organic matter, balances acidity and alkalinity, makes the nutrient structure reasonable, and can also significantly strengthen the disease resistance of rice and wheat.

At the edge of Yu Jialong's fields stand more than a dozen solar insect-killing lamps. “One lamp covers 30 mu of land. When the lamps are lit on summer and autumn evenings, moths and other flying insects rush toward the high-voltage filament from all directions and are knocked down. Previously, the plant protection cost for the two seasons of rice and wheat was about 160 yuan per mu. After installing solar insect-killing lamps, the plant protection cost per mu is less than 80 yuan.” Yu Jialong said that using solar insect-killing lamps and biological pesticides to prevent and control diseases and pests can control chemical pesticide pollution of the environment from the source and improve grain quality and selling prices.