How can grain growers be so confident?

“The harvest is not bad, averaging over 1,240 jin per mu.” Sha Cairong, 46, standing in a warehouse stacked with rice at the village entrance, told the reporter, “Look, this is the rice from over 100 mu, to be processed into milled rice and then sold. The rice from the remaining 250 mu has already been sold, third-grade mixed rice, one yuan fifty-three fen per jin.”

Sha Cairong is a farmer from Houzhou Village, Bieqiao Town, Liyang City, Jiangsu Province. By the end of last year, the land he had transferred reached over 400 mu, and at the beginning of this year he received the certification for a grain-growing family farm, becoming the village's well-known family farm owner.

This year, the natural conditions during the rice heading and flowering period were not particularly good, putting considerable pressure on agricultural production in Liyang. Sha Cairong, however, was not too concerned. He said farming now is not like before, and he is basically “confident.” ——Why?

“400 mu of fields, all harvested and planted in one week”

On the morning of November 29, the sky was heavily overcast, and the wind was very cold. Sha Cairong, with his hands tucked in his sleeves, took the reporter to the land he had newly transferred last year. The over 100 mu of winter wheat before their eyes was growing vigorously.

“Once the wheat comes up, there is basically no grass in the field. I put in both the herbicide and the urea by machine.” As he spoke, Sha Cairong took out his phone, “This was taken on October 26. Here the combine harvester is harvesting, and behind it is the straw crushing and scattering machine; here is fertilizing and rotary tilling, and this is a seed spreader I modified from a high-speed rice transplanter; here is the ditching machine. 400 mu of fields, all harvested and planted in one week. Without machinery, it would be very hard to guarantee that.”

In Houzhou Village, Sha Cairong belonged to the earlier group of people to accept new agricultural machinery. He said that as early as 2004, when most farmers in the village were still transplanting rice by hand, he avoided a not-insignificant loss because he used machine transplanting.

“You know, we have two crops here, rice and wheat, and when harvesting wheat we have to make seedling beds. Once the temperature rises, the small brown planthoppers on the wheat will move onto the seedlings and bring the pathogen with them, which is stripe leaf blight. Once this disease is caught, there is no way to cure it. Machine transplanting is different. The seedling bed has to be covered with a breathable non-woven fabric, so the insects have fewer conditions to settle down.” Sha Cairong told the reporter that that year many households harvested only 600 to 700 jin of rice, while in a normal year, one mu can yield 1,000 jin.

At the beginning of 2009, Sha Cairong and several farmers in the village partnered to establish an agricultural machinery cooperative. Today, the membership has grown to 360, and the agricultural machinery has grown from a few units to more than 180 sets.

“Now it is basically all mechanized, and growing grain takes much less labor than before. The work that 200 laborers in a production team used to do can now be done by one person with three helpers.” Sha Cairong said cheerfully, “In the past, the laborers in the village basically could not get out, working all 365 days a year, and still not much money was left. Now, with one planting and one harvest, only about two months are busier, and the rest of the time is relatively relaxed.”

Sha Cairong told the reporter that besides the large-scale application of advanced agricultural machinery, another very important guarantee in grain production over these years has been the improvement of infrastructure.

“When rice is heading and flowering, if the temperature is too high it will not do, so you have to find a way to cool it down. Here we all regulate it with water. Irrigation conditions become very important.” Sha Cairong told the reporter that 2 li up from his land is Tangma Reservoir, and the drinking water and irrigation water for 4 nearby towns all come from there. “There is an electric pumping station in the field, and when water is needed it can be pumped directly into the field.”

This includes the consolidation of field plots and the matching of ditches, canals, and roads, which not only gave a foundation for stable and increased grain output, but also provided great convenience for local farm management.

“Originally these were all small paths, and large machinery could not get in. After harvesting the rice, it was put in bags and carried to the edge of the field by hand. Last year I spent 20,000 yuan to build this machine farming road. Now after harvesting, it is dumped directly onto the tractor, which also saves labor costs and wastes much less grain, and then it goes directly to the drying room. What comes out is all at the standard 15.5 moisture, and it is fine even if stored for half a year.” Sha Cairong said.

“There is a lot of agricultural training, and it is all free”

Unfavorable weather conditions, pests and diseases, and so on, Sha Cairong does not pay too much attention to them. Agricultural information from all sides converges here, and with the continuous follow-up of various support policies after developing a family farm, he feels that yields are increasingly within his grasp.

“Take this low temperature and little sunshine, for example. It can easily lead to rice blast.” Old Sha said, “The panicle gets moldy underneath, and then it breaks off. Ordinary farmers all know to use ‘tricyclazole’, but this medicine can only play a preventive role. This year the TV station repeatedly broadcast that uniform medication must be used, with unified prevention and control. At this stage you should use ‘isoprothiolane’ and so on, which can both prevent and treat it. Even if rain washes the medicine into the field, it does not matter, because it can still be absorbed from the roots. I sprayed three times according to what the experts said, and this disease did not occur in the field.”

In recent years, the agricultural department of Liyang City has worked hard on grassroots agricultural technology extension. Technical personnel directly guide households, coordinating with mobile phone text messages, television and radio, agricultural technology briefs, and other forms to continuously improve the delivery rate of new grain varieties and new technologies. And through large grain growers, family farms, cooperatives, and other new types of business entities, it has accelerated the matching of good seeds with good methods and the promotion of advanced and applicable technologies. All of this has let Sha Cairong taste the benefits.

“Nongxintong. Look, the large-scale planting edition of Farm Family Wealth.” Sha Cairong kept swiping his phone, “This is a text message from Changzhou City, this is from the Liyang City Agriculture and Forestry Bureau. Weather changes are known very quickly. When I know it is going to rain, I will harvest rice a bit faster and work overtime to get it in, so that the field does not get too wet for machinery to enter.”

And with the widespread use of the internet and mobile phones, technical support from the agricultural departments of Changzhou City and even Jiangsu Province is also transmitted quickly and directly to ordinary grain-growing farmers.

“This year I planted Wuyunjing 23, and the yield was very good. I have planted it for several years already. At the beginning I learned about it through ‘Recommended Good Varieties of Jiangsu’.” Sha Cairong said, “The city agriculture and forestry bureau, seed management station, crop cultivation station, agricultural technology section, and so on often organize us to go outside to look and observe high-yield fields. I remember that starting in 2006, every year there were wheat and rice ones, to see how the various varieties of others were growing, including the high-yield fields of the Yangzhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Taizhou Hongqi Farm, and the Wujin Rice Research Institute.”

Old Sha told the reporter that this year there was especially a lot of training related to agriculture, all free, and he himself went out 5 times. Because family farms receive relatively more quota spots, he also arranged for the farmers helping in the fields to go to training. “One training session lasts five or seven days, at the Agricultural College of Yangzhou University and Jiangsu Vocational College of Agriculture and Forestry, with face-to-face exchanges with expert professors, and I gained a lot of knowledge.”

After finishing the rice harvest and planting the wheat, and then reinforcing the field ridges, the work in the fields is basically finished. These past two days Sha Cairong has been busy making rice packaging. In March he registered the Shashi Rice trademark and opened an online store on Taobao. Although young people now all want to go to the city, he is still willing to grow grain at home.

“Although I am a farmer, and what I grow is still rice, not a cash crop, the income is quite considerable. This year net income was 320,000, 70,000 to 80,000 yuan higher than originally expected. People who work at companies joke and say, ‘Boss Sha’, none of us are as good as you.” Sha Cairong said with a smile, “No matter when, people all have to eat.”

When talking about growing grain, Old Sha is very professional, and also very serious. He is also very optimistic about the future of grain-growing family farms: “With scale, it is not as scattered as one household after another, and it will not be done as a side business.” He said that family farm owners growing grain will be more professional and more dedicated. “For example, if rice blast appears somewhere, I will go and see what the situation is. People who treat farming as a side business cannot do this. If he works one day for 200 yuan, then going to listen to a half-day class means 100 yuan is gone.”

Old Sha believes that family-farm-style grain growing like his is also conducive to improving the quality of agricultural products, because this is the foundation of all their profit. “Our rice quality is good, it is just that the packaging grade is a bit low.” Sha Cairong pulled out a simple packaging bag from the warehouse, the most common kind of woven plastic bag on the market. “My next step is to do vacuum packaging, so it will look a bit more upscale.”

But Old Sha said, just like eating mooncakes on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, no matter how it is packaged, what you eat is still the mooncake, not the box. “Quality is the main thing. I have my own trademark. If I do not guarantee quality, there will be no reputation, and there can be no market.”