High grain yields cannot be achieved without the clustered, coordinated approach

October, the harvest season. Across the vast fields of Henan and Shandong, combine harvesters, tillage tractors and grain-hauling tricycles shuttle back and forth through the fields and along the paths, while flocks of foraging birds rise and settle from time to time... At the field edges and on the drying grounds, farmers work the land while chatting, breaking into hearty laughter now and then. "This year's harvest is good" and "the technical services are good" are the things they most often say when answering reporters' questions, and being there, one can feel the joy that comes from the bottom of farmers' hearts because of the bumper grain harvest. In recent years, the two places of Henan and Shandong have taken innovation as their driving force and given play to their agricultural clustering advantages, which is the key to their high grain yields.

Integrating agriculture-related project resources to give play to the clustering effect

Linyi County in Shandong Province, which has won the national advanced grain production title seven times in a row, produced 929,000 tons of grain last year and achieved an "eleventh consecutive increase"; this year it is sprinting toward the goal of a full-year total output of one million tons. Huaxian County, long known as the "granary of northern Henan," the No. 1 wheat county in China, China and the No. 1 grain-producing county in Henan Province, according to yield measurement surveys by the agricultural department, saw its 15 ten-thousand-mu maize high-yield demonstration plots average 1506.4 jin per mu this year, leading the county's average autumn grain yield per mu to break through 1200 jin. What is the reason for the high yields? The answers of agricultural officials in both places were exactly the same: pooling the use of agriculture-related project funds is one of the important reasons.

In Lankao County, Henan, Wang Wujun, deputy director of the county agriculture bureau, said that with Henan suffering a severe drought this year, the county government integrated various agriculture-related project funds and, on top of the existing irrigation conditions, sank 240 new motor-pumped wells, repaired more than 300 motor-pumped wells and equipped 240 water pumps to protect the harvest. "Compared with last year, maize yield per mu increased by nearly 15 kg, a rise of 3.5%."

Since last year, Linyi County has taken the construction of high-yield demonstration plots as its vehicle, adhering to a single "one map" for the whole county.

Breaking down township boundaries, it integrated funds from the plan for a 100-billion-jin grain production capacity, comprehensive agricultural development, land consolidation and other projects, investing a cumulative 2.6 hundred million yuan, grasping the "bull's nose" of water conservancy, and carefully carrying out small-scale farmland water conservancy projects, developing high-efficiency water-saving irrigation on 410,000 mu, so that the county's high-standard farmland with guaranteed yields in drought and flood reached more than 700,000 mu. "This year, we undertook the Ministry of Agriculture's task of tackling key problems in the model for increasing summer maize yields. According to yield measurements by agricultural technical experts, maize in the 100,000-mu demonstration area averaged 687 kg per mu, maize is expected to yield 832,000 tons, and the full-year total grain output is expected to break through one million tons," said Lin Chunyuan, county head of Linyi County.

Organizing farmer households into cooperatives saves the cost of farming and raises land output

"The cooperative provides technical guidance, and also unified seed supply, unified cultivation, unified pesticide spraying and fertilization, unified harvesting, and unified straw return to the field, which saves money and also saves worry." Zhu Laikuo, a villager of Shuanglou Village, Ciqiu Town, Wenshang County, Shandong, told reporters that since joining the cooperative last year, the busy farming season has been much less of a worry. "We just haul the grain home and that's it."

Wang Hongwei, county head of Wenshang County, introduced that the government has actively cultivated socialized service organizations for plant protection, agricultural machinery and other services, providing farmers with full-process socialized services. "Relying on the county's supply and marketing network and socialized service organizations, an organizational and operational system has been formed with the county supply and marketing cooperative as the lead, agricultural machinery, plant protection and other service cooperatives as support, and the participation of village 'two committees,' organizing farmers to join cooperatives while providing farmers with land trusteeship or semi-trusteeship services for cultivation, management, harvesting, drying, storage and sales, which not only solves the problem of who will farm the land, but also saves the cost of farming and raises land output."

In Huaxian County, Henan, in order to encourage farmer households to join cooperatives, the government organized new-type business entities, skilled farmers and village cadre representatives from all townships and towns across the county to go deep into demonstration cooperatives and observe on site the cooperatives' high-yield planting techniques, using real examples that farmers can see and touch to draw them along to look and lead them along to work.

In Linyi County, the government innovatively established a method whereby Party branches lead the founding of farmers' professional cooperatives, raising the level of organization, market orientation and specialization of grain production. Farmer households are encouraged to join with capital, technology, farm machinery or land in various forms, absorbing local capable people, specialized large households and individual industrial and commercial households into the cooperatives, and setting up service groups according to different specialties, so as to achieve the clustering and integration of agricultural technology, machinery, information and other resource elements and realize resource sharing.

The three villages of Zhaojia Community in Mengsi Town, Linyi County, put 2906 mu of land into the cooperative; through jointly buying machinery with members by installments, the cooperative purchased 6 harvesters at a discount. Over one wheat harvest season, the net profit from mechanical operations was 80,000 yuan, and the cooperative distributed 41,000 yuan in dividends, truly making farmers realize that "the sickle cannot beat big machinery," and they vied to buy shares and join the cooperative, so that the county's wheat and maize achieved full mechanization from cultivation to harvest.

"The cooperative's unified services have promoted the organic combination of good seeds with good methods and of farm machinery with agronomy, enabling grain production to save costs, increase income and raise efficiency, and removing the worries of each household 'fighting its own battle,'" said Wang Fenghai, director of the Linyi County Agriculture Bureau.

In addition, large grain-growing households in various places have allied with one another and taken the road of collectivization in order to resist the risks of farming, seeking development and safeguarding income growth. Following the "autumn grain exploration trip" reporting group all the way, the reporter indeed saw the vitality of today's innovative agricultural development. For example, a new-type agricultural technology extension system with county and township agricultural technology extension service centers as the main body, village science and technology leader households as auxiliaries, and enterprises and socialized service organizations widely participating, delivers grain production science and technology services to the fields, so that farmers truly get help in farming; the agricultural production methods of the two places have also basically achieved a great leap from mainly human and animal power to mainly mechanical operations, and the capacity for forecasting and early warning of agricultural disasters has also been further raised... In fact, all of this is precisely the foundation of agricultural development and grain income growth today and in the future.