Cultivating New-Type Professional Farmers Should Target Diverse Participants

The State Council's "Decision on Accelerating the Development of Modern Vocational Education" calls for “serving the construction of the national food security guarantee system, actively developing modern agricultural vocational education, establishing a public-interest farmer cultivation and training system, and vigorously cultivating new-type professional farmers.”

How can agriculture-related higher vocational colleges accurately define their positioning and effectively leverage their own advantages to serve the development of modern agricultural industry? Jiangsu Polytechnic College of Agriculture and Forestry adheres to the purpose of serving “agriculture, rural areas and farmers,” is guided by cultivating high-quality technical and skilled talent, and fully leverages its advantages in specialties, faculty and technology. It innovates cultivation models and service methods, adheres to the “four orientations,” effectively resolves the problem of agricultural talent shortage, promotes the upgrading of rural industry levels, and drives the development of regional rural economies.

⟦NL> Targeting multiple participants to provide tailored training packages

For enrolled students, cultivating future young farm owners. The college takes cultivating future young farm owners as an important lever for adapting to agricultural intensification and industrialization, and each year cultivates nearly 2,000 young farm owners who “understand technology, know how to operate, and are good at management.” The “Taicang Class” and “Fangyuan Class” are typical examples. The college cooperates with the Taicang Municipal Government and Jiangsu Fangyuan Group respectively, adopting the model of “targeted enrollment, position-specific training, organizational payment, and return-home employment.” The college tailors talent cultivation plans according to requirements to cultivate the professional qualities, professional knowledge and skills needed by new-type professional farmers.

To enhance enrolled students' ability to start their own businesses, the college turns its practical training base into a cradle for cultivating young farm owners, formulates preferential policies, and adopts a contracting method of “zero investment, full-process, settlement at the end.” On the premise of resolving students' early-stage entrepreneurial capital investment, it signs contracts with students, assigns teachers with rich production experience and industry technical workers to guide the whole process, and resolves the technical risks of student entrepreneurship.

For members of village Party branch and village committee, cultivating grassroots leaders in becoming prosperous. Centering on the actual needs of agricultural and rural development, the college actively cooperates with local government departments to train village-level leadership team members and Party members, jointly cultivating village-level leaders in becoming prosperous. It has successively jointly opened adult academic education classes with the Organization Departments of the Municipal Party Committees of Huai'an, Yancheng, Zhenjiang, Xuzhou and Suqian, and innovatively implemented an agricultural talent cultivation model of “government funding, school training, farmers benefiting.”

Taking the “Huai'an Class” as an example, this class is jointly run by the Organization Department of the Huai'an Municipal Party Committee and the college, and the trainees are village Party branch and village committee cadres under the age of 45 and village-level reserve cadres. During training, experts bring the college's industrial technology and scientific research achievements, and each year use the agricultural slack season to carry out training in 6 periods, with each concentrated training lasting 2~3 days. After training ends, experts lead students into villages and station there, cultivating demonstration households through face-to-face guidance and hands-on mentoring.

For entrepreneurial farmers, cultivating large production and operation households. Training entrepreneurial farmers and guiding farmers to develop industries scientifically and efficiently is an important channel for promoting farmers' income growth and prosperity. The college has successively carried out farmer entrepreneurship training in Jurong City of Zhenjiang, Lishui District of Nanjing, Liyang City of Changzhou and other places. The training aims to cultivate high-quality entrepreneurial farmers, and through training, more than 10% of trainees become heads of agricultural professional cooperatives or agricultural entrepreneurs or family farm owners.

The college has specially established trainee files, issues follow-up guidance cards to teachers and trainees, regularly or irregularly hires relevant experts to diagnose the enterprises or production and operation entities founded by trainees, establishes long-term interactive relations between trainees and entrepreneurship coaching experts, and guides their healthy development. According to post-training visit statistics, 80% of trainees re-examined their own business projects, their management concepts and market awareness generally increased, and they obtained notable economic benefits.

For local people, supporting farmers in distinctive industries. As a member unit of Jiangsu Province's “County-linked Agricultural Strengthening and People-enriching Project,” the college actively uses its own industrial technology and talent advantages to serve rural economic development. Centering on the college's five major industries such as grass industry, seasonal fruits and vegetables, and colored-leaf nursery stock, and ten advanced practical technologies such as seedling virus elimination and grape root-restriction cultivation, it connects with 34 villages in 7 counties including Jurong and Sihong, builds 37 industrial demonstration bases, and while delivering industry and technology into farmers' hands, arranges technology stationing experts. According to farmers' actual needs, technical expert groups formulate practical technical training plans and carry out multiple targeted “farmer field technical training” sessions such as red-cheek strawberry seedling propagation and strawberry pest and disease control, realizing a new social service training model of “classrooms moved to the village entrance, teachers and students to the field, achievements into farming households, and papers written on the land.”

Suggestions for running new-type professional farmer education well

First, we must adhere to a training mechanism with multi-party participation. To carry out farmer training, relying only on the strength of schools is limited. It requires multi-party participation and pragmatic cooperation of the government, enterprises and other participants, effectively giving play to the functional role of all parties in training and forming a joint force for training. In training, the government needs to play the roles of formulator of farmer training guidelines and policies, coordinator of training activities, and provider of training funds; enterprises need to be responsible for providing practical training venues and applied technology demonstrations; schools need to do a good job in organizational management, faculty and industrial technology guarantees.

Second, we must adhere to combining technical guidance with industrial assistance. To carry out farmer training, schools need to provide targeted guidance in production technology, operation and management, and more importantly, pay attention to assistance from the industry. While promoting changes in production methods and business concepts, according to regional characteristics and development positioning, and in combination with school industrial advantages, they should cultivate and promote distinctive industries suitable for the region and drive farmers to become prosperous.

Third, we must adhere to continuous innovation in training models and methods. Farmer training has multi-level and multi-type characteristics. Therefore, in the training process, attention should be paid to innovation in training models. According to the requirements of industrial development and the needs of trainees, multi-form training methods should be adopted to truly enable participating farmers to “understand, learn, and apply.”