What does a professional manager at an agricultural cooperative do?

In mid-to-late July, it is the critical period for the “double rush” of Hunan rice. Despite the hot weather, Yang Yuming of Xidu Town, Hengyang County, Hunan, comes to the rice fields of Douling Village early every morning to check on the rush harvest of early rice and the transplanting of late rice.

Yang Yuming is an ordinary farmer in his 50s who used to make a living from farming, and now he is a mid-level manager at the Funong High-Quality Rice Professional Cooperative. The head of the cooperative said that the cooperative has a total of 3200 mu of rice fields, and without “professional managers” like Yang Yuming who both understand farming and can manage workers, it would be difficult to ensure the progress of this year's “double rush.”

In fact, farming used to be a “small-scale peasant economy” of one household after another, and even those with a slightly larger scale only hired a few seasonal workers during busy farming periods, showing a trend of “part-time farming” in agricultural production. In recent years, as rural land transfers have accelerated and the level of scale has increased, new agricultural operating entities such as cooperatives, large grain growers, and family farms have mostly transferred hundreds or thousands of mu of land, and “professional managers” have emerged as the times require.

Yan Weijie, a large grain grower in Hengyang County who once ran a factory in Guangdong for more than 10 years, believes that farm fields should now be regarded as “rice production enterprises,” which requires modern enterprise management models and professional management talent.

The reporter learned that the work of “professional managers” mainly includes production material allocation, field management, pest and disease prevention, and allocation of scattered labor. Some cooperatives also have dedicated water managers, who are responsible for coordinating irrigation and drainage during the critical growth periods of rice. Borrowing the title “CEO” (Chief Executive Officer), they might as well be called “CWO” (Chief Water Officer).

In the modern enterprise system, an important duty of professional managers is to preserve and increase the value of enterprise assets. In agricultural cooperatives, “professional managers” bear the important task of stabilizing and increasing grain production. Their compensation is generally composed of “basic salary + management fee + commission,” and most of them adopt an annual salary system.