Seedling factories don't just grow seedlings; they also provide full-process planting and harvesting and soil-testing formula services
What does a seedling factory do? Grow seedlings? At the seedling factory of the Shanghe Farmers' Cooperative in Lintang Village, Chiba Town, Jianli County, Hubei Province, what Chairman Ouyang Bin talks about most is not seedling raising.
Last year, when reporters came here for an interview, Ouyang Bin enumerated one by one the benefits the seedling factory brought to farmers. This year, when reporters visited the place again, he spent quite a while calculating for them the benefit-to-farmers account of specialized services.
“From planting to harvesting, full package service throughout, farmers can make money while holding a teacup and wearing leather shoes.” People in Jianli have the habit of having their shoes polished, and the “shoe-polishing women” are even a labor-service brand of the county. Since he dared to say that farmers could make money wearing leather shoes, Ouyang Bin naturally had confidence: the cooperative provides whole-process service for rice planting, with a package price of 590 yuan, about 200 yuan less than farming and planting by oneself.
⟦NL> According to Ouyang Bin, this 200 yuan in benefit to farmers starts right from buying rice seed and raising seedlings. After the cooperative signs seedling-raising orders with farmers, it negotiates collectively with seed companies and purchases uniformly at low prices, minimizing the price of rice seed. In the plant protection stage, the machine operators who hold shares with agricultural machinery provide services using pesticide-and-fertilizer combined spraying machines with adjustable spraying range, treating 1 mu of field per minute, saving 20 yuan per mu compared with farmers applying pesticides and fertilizers themselves.
At the Haotian Agricultural Machinery Professional Cooperative in Zhefu Village, Maoshi Town, Chairman Zhou Bing calculated the benefit-to-farmers account of specialized services in even greater detail. Holding the whole-process service price list in one hand and pressing a calculator in his mind, he said: “According to the prices of the full set of services listed on this table, the cost for farmers to purchase services is 1.2 yuan per sq m per season; growing two seasons a year makes it 2.4 yuan. Then based on this year's average yield, the income from one sq m is 4.5 yuan, and the net profit per sq m is 2.1 yuan. That is to say, without farming the land themselves, farmers can still net 1400 yuan from one mu of land.”
As Hubei's number one grain county, Jianli's rice yield this year is estimated at 2.95 billion jin, an increase of 140 million jin over the previous year. “Thanks to our county's active cultivation of new types of business entities, to guiding the orderly circulation of rural land, and also to seedling factories driving the development of modern agriculture, Jianli's rice has again had a good harvest this year.” Dong Xinfa, secretary of the Jianli County Party Committee, told reporters that for the bumper grain harvest for the whole year, the seedling factories deserve great credit.
Jianli's seedling factories have indeed become very popular. In 2012, Jianli had its first seedling factory. Over the past three years, more than ten seedling factories have been added each year. Up to now, 220 centralized seedling-raising demonstration sites have been built, including 43 large-scale factory-based seedling-raising bases. The 43 seedling factories have a total investment of 300 million yuan, serve an area of 600,000 mu, and drive the county's machine-transplanted rice area to 1.1 million mu.
The rice-growing tradition of thousands of years is certainly an important reason for the development of seedling factories, but why so fast? Why these two or three years?
Xu Jinpu, member of the Standing Committee of the Jianli County Party Committee, explained to reporters that in the past two years Jianli County has fully supported the development of seedling factories through three methods: subsidies, financial services, and policy support. In terms of financial support, it implemented rewards in place of subsidies and subsidies after construction first. The county finance department gives a one-time subsidy of about 200,000 yuan to each standardized seedling factory built. In terms of financial services, it implemented competitively allocated discounted loans. In 2014, it provided 29 million yuan in loan discounts to 7,000 new types of business entities across the county, with 300 million yuan in financing. In terms of policy support, it gave a reward of 30 yuan per mu to transferees of contiguous land circulation of more than 500 mu.
More importantly, the seedling factories that have become popular are no longer merely carrying the function of raising seedlings for Jianli's rice farmers.
Reporters found during interviews that two years ago, Jianli's first batch of seedling factories did indeed focus mainly on centralized seedling raising, but in the past two years, both existing and newly built seedling factories generally carried, in the form of cooperatives, six functions including centralized seedling raising, agricultural machinery services, unified prevention and control, agricultural materials supply, rice planting, and vegetable production. Seedling factories with more complete industrial chains also had other professional cooperatives for livestock breeding, rice drying, storage, land trusteeship, and seedling cultivation. Zou Haibin, deputy director of the Jianli County Party Committee Office, told reporters that at present, the 43 seedling factories across Jianli County have developed 344 cooperatives, most of which can provide specialized services.
Seedling factories have become, as it were, agricultural complexes of new types of business entities and specialized service organizations.
Taking the Haotian Agricultural Machinery Professional Cooperative as an example, as a new type of business entity, in addition to circulating 3000 mu of land, it also operates quite a lot of land in which farmers hold shares and land under trusteeship. All this land is planted with rice, and the varieties are unified. Chairman Zhou Bing's idea is to lay the foundation for building a rice brand in the future. In addition, the centralized use period of seedling-raising facilities is three months each year; for the rest of the time, the Haotian Agricultural Machinery Professional Cooperative uses its seedling-raising facilities as shares to cooperate with Taiwan Alishan Vegetable Breeding Company in vegetable breeding.
As a specialized service organization, the full set of service items of the Haotian Agricultural Machinery Professional Cooperative includes: machine plowing, seedling raising, rice transplanting, plant protection, soil testing and formula, harvesting, drying, and storage. Moreover, cooperative members also receive discounts. The member price for the full set of services is 650 yuan per mu, and they also enjoy 25% of the net profit of the second-season crop.
Do farmers approve of the specialized services of seedling factories?
Li Qiqing of Qinyang Village, Xingou Town, Jianli County, circulated 90 mu of low-lying fields and 30 mu of ditches and ponds, intercropping rice and crayfish. This year the crayfish did not sell at a good price, earning only 60,000 yuan, while the gross income from planting rice was 200,000 yuan.
“No matter how much more land is circulated, it can still be farmed; there just aren't enough hands.” Li Qiqing told reporters that hiring one laborer in Jianli now costs 180 yuan a day, and two or three meals must also be provided, which works out to a labor cost of 200 yuan. However, buying specialized services at a seedling factory, including seedling raising and machine transplanting with 3 jin of seed, costs only 240 yuan per mu. “Unfortunately, what I circulated is low-lying field, which is inconvenient for mechanical operation.” Still unable to count on the full-process service of seedling factories, Li Qiqing felt very regretful.
During the interview, reporters found an interesting thing that illustrates the benefit-to-farmers effect of seedling factories better than anything else: a farmer approaching sixty in Zhefu Village, Maoshi Town, circulated the cultivated land of his three-person household to the village seedling factory at 700 yuan per mu (800 sq m per mu), while he himself circulated 70 mu of low-lying field at 200 yuan per mu.
“Seedling factories get high returns from farming, so I circulate land out at a high price; the low-lying field still can't count on mechanization, so I circulate land in at a low price and farm it myself.” The farmer who said this with a smile is Yang Shihao, and villagers all say he is a “shrewd man.”