Knowledge Gives Modern Farmers Wings to Soar

"Ensuring over a billion people eat their fill, eat well, and eat safely with peace of mind" is the new demand of the times that modern society places on China's agriculture. Eating one's fill involves "two guarantees": guaranteeing the abundance of today's "rice bag" and "vegetable basket," and guaranteeing the fullness of future generations' "rice bowl" and "dinner table"; eating well requires "two qualities": rich variety so that you can have whatever you want to eat, and excellent quality so that whatever you eat is good; eating safely with peace of mind requires "two grasps": grasping standardized production to "grow" safety, and grasping whole-process supervision to "manage" peace of mind. Our country has many people but little land and scarce water, and agriculture remains mainly traditional, small-scale, and dispersed; eating one's fill is already not easy, eating well is even harder, and eating safely with peace of mind faces major tests. The way out for agriculture lies in modernization. We must rely on scientific and technological progress and innovative management systems to raise land output rates, resource utilization rates, and labor productivity, strengthen comprehensive agricultural production capacity to ensure supply, develop high-quality agricultural products to ensure safety, and achieve ecological and environmental sustainability to ensure that the "vast expanse of fertile farmland" can be cultivated forever.

The household contract responsibility system that began in the early 1980s, through the management approach of "every household contracting land, every household farming," mobilized farmers' enthusiasm and fundamentally solved the problem of "insufficient food and clothing." In today's Chinese society, farmers have new choices of going to cities to work and new expectations of becoming urban residents, and a considerable portion of households that contracted land no longer farm it. Adapting to the new trend of changes in our country's agricultural production relations, new types of operating entities such as specialized large households with moderate-scale operations, family farms, farmer cooperatives, and agricultural enterprises have continuously emerged, creating diverse new operating forms such as modern household operation, collective operation, cooperative operation, and enterprise operation. Their basic characteristics are being based on household operation, linked by cooperation and association, and supported by socialized services. This is the inevitable choice for our country's agricultural modernization.

The intensive management of modern agriculture is concentrated in the input of modern production factors and their combination with traditional production factors. Production tools such as modern equipment are developing faster and being widely used, with the most prominent being agricultural mechanization and rural informatization. At present, our country's comprehensive mechanization level for plowing, sowing, and harvesting exceeds 59%, efforts to research, develop, and promote agricultural machinery-agronomy integration technology have increased, and high-horsepower, automated, and precision high-end agricultural machinery is no longer rare. The mode of agricultural production has shifted from being dominated by human and animal power for thousands of years to a new stage dominated by mechanical operations. Information technology can be said to change with each passing day; cloud technology, the Internet of Things, and big data are all racing ahead, and are being actively applied across the entire field of agricultural production and operation, agricultural product quality traceability, and e-commerce. Intelligent mobile terminals will make information services available at all times, everywhere, and capable of everything.

The transformation from traditional agriculture to modern agriculture inevitably requires the transformation from traditional farmers to modern farmers. At the Fifth Plenary Session of the Sixteenth Central Committee, the central authorities proposed cultivating new-type farmers who are educated, understand technology, and know how to operate. The just-concluded Central Rural Work Conference raised "who will farm the land" to a strategic height, emphasized solving the core issue of people well through enriching farmers, improving farmers, and supporting farmers, and required focusing on attracting young people to farm and cultivating professional farmers, establishing special policy mechanisms, building a professional farmer workforce, and forming a high-quality team of agricultural production and operators. This high quality should include: junior middle school education or above; agricultural professional ethics such as the concept of the rule of law, awareness of integrity, responsibility for agricultural product quality and safety, and responsibility for ecological and environmental protection; modern agricultural technologies such as high yield and high quality, disaster prevention and mitigation, green safety, and facilities and equipment; and modern agricultural operation and management knowledge such as agricultural policy, decision-making management, farm operation, and product marketing.