Anhui Ningguo City's sharp tool for farmers to get rich gets sharper with use

    On August 14, the service hall of the Nanji Township government was crowded with people. More than 90 subsidy agreements for hickory nut dehulling machines and one for a harvester were successfully signed. A farmer surnamed Yao from Longchuan Village in Nanji Township told the reporter: "In recent years, hickory nut output has increased greatly. Traditional manual dehulling is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also causes a high damage rate. Now things are better. The advanced hickory nut dehulling machines that have entered thousands of households have completely solved these problems." 
　　 
It is understood that by the end of 2007, our city had a total of more than 28,000 various types of new agricultural machinery, with total agricultural machinery power reaching 173,400 kilowatts. Agricultural mechanization services save costs and increase efficiency by more than 200 million yuan each year. In terms of types, in addition to field agricultural machinery, the number of high-mountain agricultural machines has been climbing year after year. Compared with the early days of reform and opening up, the total amount of agricultural machinery has increased by a net 26,000 units. 
　　 
In 1978, the total agricultural machinery power in our city was only 40,000 kilowatts, with more than 2,000 units and sets of agricultural machinery equipment, all of which were farmland cultivation machines. The use of agricultural machinery in mountainous areas was almost zero, and people relied on human labor, animal power and simple primitive tools for production. In 1989, closely following the pace of the transition from a planned economy to a market economy, our city's agricultural machinery undertaking developed vigorously. In 1995, our city spent a huge sum of 350,000 yuan to introduce the first imported combine harvester. Thereafter, centering on the adjustment of the agricultural industrial structure, our city continuously increased the intensity of agricultural machinery promotion. Various types of suitable agricultural machinery sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain in the fields and at the edges of fields across the city's rural areas, and the popularization of agricultural machinery and the development of agricultural industries gradually formed a virtuous cycle of complementing and promoting each other. In 1997, our city was rated by the provincial government as one of the province's top ten counties for agricultural machinery. 
　　 
In recent years, focusing closely on the five major agricultural leading industries of hickory nuts, tea, bamboo, livestock and poultry breeding, and seedlings and flowers, our city has successively introduced high-lift sprayers and foggers, energy-saving tea leaf strip-sorting machines, tea garden cultivators, pruning machines, and high-lift water pumps, and successfully developed hickory nut dehulling machines and kernel sorting machines, solving the technical problems in the development of the five major leading industries in one stroke and forming a new pattern of serving characteristic industries and developing characteristic agricultural machinery. In addition, in response to the relatively scattered distribution of paddy fields in mountainous areas and the large proportion of sloping fields and valley fields, the modernization and renewal of cultivation machinery was completed, realizing the "four major transformations" from mechanization of the main links of agricultural production to mechanization of the entire agricultural production process, from mechanization of grain and oil crops alone to mechanization covering economic fruit forests and breeding industries, from mechanization of production links to mechanization covering primary processing of agricultural products and cold storage and preservation, and from the agricultural machinery department playing a one-man show to multi-department coordination and cooperation.