Farm machinery is too expensive, so you don't need to buy it: a thousand contract-farming operators are online for you to choose from

The farmland labor shortage is serious, and mechanization is needed to help, but the cost of purchasing farm machinery is high and small farmers generally cannot afford it, so they often seek help from contract-farming operators. To integrate mechanized farming services for different crops across various regions and increase the utilization rate of existing farm machinery, the Council of Agriculture guided 14 counties and cities to establish mechanized farming associations and built the "Agricultural Machinery Farming Service System," billed as an "Uber for farm machinery"! It lets farmers easily find nearby contract-farming operators online and quickly match with the farming services they need.

The types of farm machinery currently offered range from common tractors and rice transplanters to sweet potato and sugarcane harvesters, as well as combine harvesters for peanuts, soybeans, rice and large-scale coarse grains (including sorghum, edamame and dent corn). "It's not just rice; the scope of contract farming has already expanded to crops such as coarse grains and tea, and the types of machinery cover everything needed for planting, field management and harvesting."

The platform matches farmers with operators and improves farm machinery utilization

Chen Yen-ching, chairman of the Taoyuan City Contract Farming Association, said that Guishan and Longtan in Taoyuan are concentrated tea garden areas, but manual tea picking is time-consuming and labor-intensive; introducing tea-picking machines can reduce labor by at least five times. "A tea garden originally needed 10 people to pick tea, but with one machine, only 2 people are needed to help." In addition, Taoyuan City also has about 17,000 hectares of rice-growing areas, and there is demand for rice harvesters every year. Therefore, he believes that unified official integration of contract-farming services across regions can make it easier for farmers to find operators and also make contract-farming service information more transparent.

Lai Hsi-lien, chairman of the Miaoli County Contract Farming Association, pointed out that Miaoli grows rice as well as coarse grains such as sweet potatoes, black beans and coix seed, and has long faced a shortage of labor. Farmers who purchase farm machinery, in order to offset the high purchase cost, all need to help with contract farming here and there. "One harvester costs 3 million! To recoup the cost as soon as possible, of course you help with contract farming. Sometimes you even have to go out of town to take on jobs."

Now that there is a platform that can help match farmers with operators, he hopes it can improve farm machinery utilization so that contract-farming operators can find contract-farming farmland nearby. However, he also pointed out that in the future more and more contract-farming operators will join the "Agricultural Machinery Farming Service System," so how to ensure the quality of contract-farming services will require the government to do more gatekeeping.

Fierce competition in contract farming, expanding the scope of services

Yang Sheng-lung, secretary-general of the Hualien County Contract Farming Association, said that Hualien's agriculture faces many problems, among which the labor shortage is the most serious. Affected by population outflow and aging, most of those left farming in Hualien are elderly farmers, and when they cannot find labor, they can only grit their teeth and do it themselves. Because rice in the east is harvested later than in the west, contract-farming operators in Hualien mostly take advantage of the gap period to develop in the west and look for contract-farming business.

Can building an integrated platform increase the income of contract-farming operators? Yang Sheng-lung smiled wryly and said not necessarily, because competition among contract-farming operators is fierce everywhere. "You just earn a little here and there, otherwise it's not worth it." However, he believes that the biggest advantage of establishing a national mechanized farming association and building a farm machinery service platform is that contract-farming services now have a unified window, helping farmers become more familiar with contract-farming services and expanding the service scope of contract-farming operators.