Livestock industry transformation can be advanced through family farms

Since last year's No. 1 Central Document encouraged the development of “family farms” for the first time, family farms have sprung up everywhere, and the livestock breeding industry is no exception.

In fact, in recent years many skilled livestock breeders have contracted land to carry out large-scale breeding, specialty breeding and other methods, becoming veritable “family farm owners”, achieving impressive results and also exploring valuable experience for the development of the livestock breeding family farm model.

“Family farms” are a new type of livestock industry operating entity. Developing “family farms” is not only conducive to solving the problem of large-scale livestock breeding, but also conducive to absorbing capital, technology and other factor resources for the livestock industry, and even more conducive to improving and stabilizing the industrialization chain and ensuring the quality and safety of livestock products. They are an important vehicle for advancing the transformation and upgrading of the livestock industry and comprehensively increasing the income of farmers and herders under the new situation.

⟦NL> However, livestock breeding “family farms” also face a series of problems in their development, such as the low education level of talent, severe shortage of self-owned funds, difficulty in obtaining breeding loans, and small coverage of specialty industry insurance.

In this regard, in developing family farms, on the one hand, we should, in accordance with the provisions of the No. 1 Central Document, channel new livestock industry subsidies toward family farms, encourage family farms to contract and operate moderately scaled breeding farms, and strive to raise the level of intensive production and operation of farming and herding households. On the other hand, we should establish government-funded agricultural and livestock guaranty companies and risk funds to provide guarantees for family farms and large breeding households, and guide credit cooperation between family farms with large operating scale and good credit records and large livestock households. When livestock households fail to honor contracts or agreements and cause certain losses to large livestock households, the government can provide appropriate compensation from the risk funds to protect the enthusiasm of private enterprises investing in the livestock industry. At the same time, it is necessary to rationalize the development system of agricultural and livestock insurance, support agricultural and livestock insurance, and the government should provide corresponding subsidies to all insurance companies involved in livestock breeding insurance, so as to attract insurance companies to willingly participate in livestock breeding insurance, and thereby gradually establish a catastrophe risk diversification mechanism for agriculture and livestock.