How to effectively plug waste outside the dining table
A few days ago, during the National Grain Love and Grain Saving Publicity Week, the State Administration of Grain, together with relevant departments, carried out activities to bring grain loss reduction and efficiency improvement into villages, schools, and households, explaining scientific and technological knowledge on grain planting, harvesting, and storage as well as knowledge on saving grain and reducing losses.
China's grain output has increased year after year, but waste and loss of grain still exist in all links. According to estimates, after harvest, the total loss and waste of grain in China in links such as farmer household storage, storage, transportation, and processing alone reaches more than 70 billion jin each year, equivalent to one year's rations for 200 million people.
While reducing waste at the dining table, waste outside the dining table also cannot be ignored. From harvest to processing, in which processes is grain mainly wasted and lost? How should losses be minimized to the greatest extent? What results has China achieved in reducing grain loss and improving efficiency? Reporters visited many places to investigate.
Grain harvesting process
Improper handling easily causes losses
Li Weiquan of Yicheng City, Xiangyang, Hubei, cooperated with others to establish a family farm and transferred more than 1,600 mu of land to grow wheat. "The harvest is good every year, with an average yield of a little more than 1,000 jin per mu," Li Weiquan said. "Mechanized harvesting saves trouble and effort, but there is still some waste, and it hurts to see it." Due to lodged straw, uneven plots, and repeated collisions of the harvester, about 30 jin of grain is lost per mu.
An official who has long worked in the agricultural machinery department told reporters that the performance and harvesting speed of harvesters are the main causes of waste. Some harvester drivers, in order to rush for efficiency, generally operate the machine at a speed higher than the normal required speed during harvesting, which often causes rice grains to be thrown out of the harvester before they are completely separated from the straw.
Ding Shuikun, a major grain grower in Erwan Village, Yihe Town, Yingcheng City, mainly relies on manual harvesting for the land he transferred. During the busy farming season, he hires more than 20 workers at most. Ding Shuikun said, "Everyone cuts stalk by stalk. Although it is slow, basically no wheat ears or rice ears are left behind. No one is willing to throw them away." But at the same time, after the grain is fully ripe, manual harvesting and stacking may cause threshing, with grain falling directly to the ground. After harvesting, it is dried in the yard or on the road, and wind and sun can both cause waste.
Scientific grain storage
Beware of insects eating and rats biting
After grain harvesting, the link with the greatest loss is farmer household storage. According to a previous sample survey by the State Administration of Grain, farmer household grain storage losses were the most serious in Northeast China, averaging about 10.2%; followed by Northwest China, about 8.8%; the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and the Huang-Huai-Hai region were about 7.4% and 5% respectively. Among farmer household grain storage losses, losses caused by rodent damage were the most serious. The fundamental causes of the losses are crude grain storage facilities, poor grain storage conditions, and a lack of scientific and technological methods.
A relevant responsible person of the State Administration of Grain introduced that China has a relatively large gap in warehouse capacity. According to estimates, the warehouse capacity gap in the core grain-producing areas of Northeast China once reached 50 billion jin. Some areas adopted open-air grain storage. In other major grain-producing areas such as Henan, Hebei, and Shandong, grassroots grain collection and storage outlets have severely shrunk. In many counties in western regions, mountainous areas, reservoir areas, and remote areas, there are no warehouses, no stores, and no personnel; among already built warehouses, many dangerous and old warehouses store grain while carrying risks, posing great hidden dangers.
A village official in Xinfa Village, Liaodian Town, Acheng District, Harbin, Heilongjiang, once introduced that some villagers basically have no special grain storage tools. Generally, they directly dry the grain brought back from the fields on the ground in their courtyards, commonly known as "ground-lying grain." Storing grain this way makes it difficult to avoid losses caused by moisture and mold, and it is also vulnerable to rats.
In response, national grain departments have promoted new grain storage technologies such as grain condition detection, horizontal ventilation, nitrogen-controlled atmosphere conditioning, and circulation cooling, comprehensively repaired "dangerous and old warehouses," and strengthened the construction of new warehouse capacity in major producing areas such as Northeast China. Up to now, about 145 billion jin of new warehouse capacity has been built, and about 246 billion jin of "dangerous and old warehouses" have been repaired and renovated. By the end of last year, grain departments in various places had piloted the allocation of nearly 10 million sets of standardized scientific grain storage equipment for farmer households across the country, reducing these farmer households' grain storage loss rate by an average of 6% and reducing grain losses for farmers by 2.3 billion jin each year.
Reasonable bulk transportation
Avoid transportation losses
In recent years, the tasks of linking grain production and sales, inter-provincial circulation, and regional adjustment have become increasingly heavy. However, in China's grain circulation process, the proportion of the "four bulk" methods of bulk packing, bulk transportation, bulk storage, and bulk unloading is relatively low. From the collection link to the processing link, raw grain needs to repeatedly go through the process of bagging, unpacking, and rebagging, resulting in relatively serious waste.
"The loss of bagged highway transportation or bagged railway transportation of grain is generally about 3‰, while the loss of bulk highway transportation of grain does not exceed 1.5‰, so losses can basically be reduced by half." Ma Feng, general manager of Henan Yuliang Jinyun Logistics Co., Ltd., told reporters, "Henan's total annual output of wheat and corn is about 120 billion jin. Calculated at a commodity rate of 50%, the circulable volume is about 60 billion jin. If bulk specialized vehicle transportation is realized, about 45,000 tons of grain can be saved each year."
According to Qu Xinming, chairman of the Henan Grain Trading Logistics Market, Henan has promoted bulk transportation of raw grain since 2005, but some problems still exist. For example, because specialized grain bulk vehicles are too specialized, they sacrifice cargo-matching capacity, causing many empty return trips and wasting energy. In addition, the optimal transportation radius of specialized grain bulk vehicles is within 200 km, and for long-distance transportation they are not yet capable of competing with trains.
"The price of a specialized grain bulk vehicle is about 400,000 to 500,000 yuan. For some small logistics companies, the cost is relatively high. Therefore, various modified grain bulk vehicles have appeared on the market. Although functionally they meet bulk requirements, their degree of specialization is not high, making it easier to cause secondary contamination of grain and increased losses," Qu Xinming said.
In recent years, grain departments have promoted new types of specialized transportation tools such as bulk grain trucks and inland river vessels, as well as container transportation equipment such as bulk grain and finished grain containers and special flour bulk transport vehicles, along with supporting loading and unloading facilities, striving to reduce spillage, moisture, mold, and contamination during transportation and loading and unloading. The average grain transportation loss rate has fallen by 2%.
Excessive grain processing
Less nutrition and also waste
When purchasing ingredients, many consumers attach great importance to the appearance of grain and pursue "refined, fine, and white." These grains, which look excellent in appearance, have actually undergone multiple processing steps. According to estimates, China's grain waste in the grain and oil processing link reaches more than 15 billion jin.
Is grain with a good appearance necessarily healthy? Experts introduced that, taking rice polishing as an example, rice factory processing techniques generally involve more than two rounds of polishing, and each additional round of polishing reduces the rice yield by 2-3 percentage points, increases electricity consumption by at least 10 degrees, and at the same time causes the loss of various nutrients such as vitamins and cellulose.
A relevant responsible person of the State Administration of Grain said that it is necessary to accelerate the elimination of outdated production capacity and production techniques, reasonably determine processing precision, strictly limit excessive processing, excessive polishing, and excessive packaging, and, on the premise of fully considering both processing and consumption factors, formulate a standard and technical standard system for grain and oil products that meets hygiene and quality standards while also having good taste and saving grain and reducing consumption, and change the consumption tendency of one-sidedly pursuing "refined, fine, and white." At the same time, the national standard for rice will be organized and revised based on the principles of "saving grain and reducing losses, nutrition and health." According to calculations based on the revised national standard for rice, about 25 billion jin of rice losses in the processing link can be reduced each year.