Straw turned from waste into treasure: Xiangcheng City, Henan, has a clever trick
“In previous years there was nowhere to dump the wheat straw, but this year the government helped us sell it for a bit of money. I urged relatives and friends to deliver their wheat straw to the purchasing point, and the straw that used to be a troublesome waste has become a treasure that brings wealth.” villager Li Songfa of Caoyao Administrative Village, Lizhai Town, Xiangcheng City, said happily recently.
Science and technology turn straw into treasure. This year, facing the hard task of the "burning ban," Xiangcheng City's officials wiped the worry from their faces and farmers' thinking changed greatly. At wheat harvest time, in previous years they only hoped to leave the wheat stubble a bit shorter; this year they simply harvested the wheat ears cleanly. In the past, after farmers finished harvesting the wheat, if they could not sow in time to catch the soil moisture, they had to spend extra money on drought relief to plant the autumn crop. What has changed farmers' thinking today is technological and specialized farming, which has found a new model: at summer sowing time, the straw is crushed and returned to the field, covering the ground to preserve soil moisture; after the wheat harvest is completed, a subsoiler is fitted with a seed-and-fertilizer simultaneous seeder, so subsoiling, sowing and fertilizing are completed in one pass, saving about 70 yuan per mu; when applied at autumn sowing time, this method not only increases soil fertility and preserves soil moisture, but also suppresses soil-borne diseases, and can raise yields by 50-100 kg per mu compared with traditional farming methods.
EM technology creates wonders. Xiangcheng City promotes EM technology to produce biological bacterial fertilizer: a pile of 300 cubic meters of straw, treated with bacterial fertilizer, turns into a small pile of brown decomposed straw material after 7 days. Converting 1 ton of straw requires only 6 kg of bacterial fertilizer, and the cost is low. Besides being used to decompose straw, the biological bacterial fertilizer can also be prepared with different bacterial strains and concentrations according to the needs of different crops.
For wheat at the seedling stage, the greening stage and the grain-filling stage, spraying this bacterial fertilizer can increase yield by 5%-10%, exceeding the yield increase rate of general new wheat varieties. If 2 kg of bacterial fertilizer is sprayed per mu when plowing, nearly half the chemical fertilizer can be saved. At present, this technology has been promoted on 200,000 mu in Xiangcheng City, with a cumulative grain yield increase of 7.2 million kg.
Straw processed into "golden beans." Farmer Wang Tongsheng of Wangmingkou Town, Xiangcheng City, has a straw pelletizing processing plant, where piles of straw are swallowed into machines and, after processing and drying, come out as plump round pellets. These "golden beans" can be used as feed and also as fuel for gasifier stoves. A straw processing plant like this can digest the straw of two or three townships each year. In addition, the use of straw silage and ammoniation to develop the breeding industry, and fermentation to produce biogas for new energy, have also been promoted and applied in the city.
Li Qianjin, director of the Xiangcheng City Agricultural Science Institute, said: "We actively promote the comprehensive utilization of straw, starting from the harvesting and sowing stages, using EM technology for conversion, and relying on small enterprises for processing. This can both relieve farmers of the worry of spending extra money to deal with straw and solve the troubles of soil fertility loss and difficulty in increasing grain yields. Nowadays, straw has become a 'hot favorite' in farmers' hands, officials are free of worry, and the masses are at ease."