The Making of a Professional Farmer: Top Ten Farmer Lei Yingguo

Born in 1981, Lei Yingguo is a villager of Leifang Village, Fengcheng City, Jiangxi. Earlier this year he was named one of the nation's "Top Ten Farmers" by the Ministry of Agriculture. In 2006, Lei Yingguo began to entertain the idea of large-scale farming. By August this year, the planting cooperative he founded had sold a cumulative 28,800 tons of high-quality grain to the state.

By chance, Lei Yingguo saw large tracts of farmland in a certain place in Shandong being managed on a large scale and cultivated by machinery. In the spring of 2006, he resolved to become a new type of professional farmer and set out on the path of large-scale rice cultivation, that year renting 210 mu of low- and medium-yield fields in Longshan Village. Through intensive and meticulous farming, the first season's yield per mu reached 900 jin, with the highest reaching 1,400 jin. Over the course of the year, Lei Yingguo earned his first pot of gold and tasted the joy of a bumper harvest.

The scale of planting continued to expand. In 2007, the area of paddy fields Lei Yingguo rented grew to 466 mu; in 2008 it reached 1,860 mu. That December, the Ministry of Agriculture awarded him the title of National Large Grain Grower. In May 2009, Lei Yingguo organized 61 large grain-growing households from surrounding townships to establish the largest farmers' planting cooperative in the area - the Xiushi Jiahe Planting Cooperative - and served as its chairman. From then on, he created a number of "firsts" in Fengcheng.

The first to rent agricultural aircraft to spray pesticides. In July 2009, Lei Yingguo organized and established the only systematic and specialized machinery-based pest control service team in Fengcheng City, implementing unified prevention and control. To date, the service team has cumulatively saved cooperative members more than 900,000 yuan in pest and disease control costs and increased grain yield per mu by more than 60 jin. Through demonstration and promotion, Fengcheng City this year introduced 25 large modern spraying machines (sets), applied to more than 500,000 mu of rice fields.

The first to implement factory-based seedling raising. In March 2011, he raised 150,000 yuan and built 22 seedling-raising sheds, and purchased 5 pieces of seedling-raising machinery. Driven by new technologies such as factory-based seedling raising, the more than 700 mu of machine-transplanted fields planted by the cooperative that year saw an average income increase of 5%. At present, 25 farming households have signed agreements with him for sowing, seedling raising and machine transplanting services.

The first to use rice drying technology. Previously, rice was dried on highways, which was both dangerous and prone to mixing in sand and stones; especially when sudden rainstorms hit, the rice was washed away by the rain, causing losses. In 2012, Lei Yingguo built a large grain warehouse himself and also added 4 dryers, so that rice could be dried directly and stored in the warehouse.

Lei Yingguo's cooperative has led more than 620 farming households in scientific planting, provided 4,050 jobs, and increased the annual per capita income of more than 120 farming households by nearly 3,000 yuan. The cooperative also implements unified purchase and sale of grain and agricultural materials and provides unified technical services, leading the villagers onto the path of industrialized development. Li Hualin