In the past, many rural children wanted to flee the farmland, but now more and more young people are becoming new professional farmers
What did the "post-90s" and "post-00s" bring to their parents' farms
Plant protection drone, Beidou navigation, automatic seedling raising integrated equipment...... In recent years, in the fields on the outskirts of Shanghai, all kinds of modern new agricultural machinery have been emerging, becoming a "new weapon" for agricultural production, making farming "tall". Controlling these new agricultural machines are young faces.
Once, leaving the rural life of "facing the loess with their backs to the sky" was the dream of many rural children. Nowadays, seeing the opportunity of the transformation of agricultural production to intelligence, science and technology, and modernization, more and more "post-90s" and "post-00s" farmers have taken over the baton from their parents and become new professional farmers. They are young and energetic, with a high level of education, strong learning ability, and more active thinking, actively embracing new technologies, improving the quality and efficiency of agricultural production, and also writing new answers to the question of "who will farm and how to farm".
Learning is useful
Making agriculture smarter
The first time the reporter met the "post-00s" Gu Yonghao was on the edge of a large rice field. He wore a black jacket and old leather shoes stained with mud. The 24-year-old is the vice chairman of the Qunchao Agricultural Cooperative in Zhuanghang Town, Fengxian District, which has more than 500 acres of farms, more than 100,000 rabbits and countless chickens, sheep and fish.
In 2021, he returned to the cooperative run by his father, while carrying out a "scientific and technological revolution" on the farm, transforming unmanned agricultural machinery, improving unmanned farms, and building a fully automatic seedling factory;
Gu Yonghao was born into a peasant family in Xinye Village, Fengxian. Since my grandfather's generation, every family in the village has relied on raising rabbits and selling rabbit fur to subsidize their families. When he was a child, he used to ride his bicycle with his father to sell rabbits, and the round trip lasted nearly three hours. When Gu Yonghao was 8 years old, his father set up a cooperative, which led more than 800 farmers in the village to raise rabbits. "It was those experiences that shaped my nature as a farmer and gave me a deep affection and natural affinity for farming. Gu Yonghao said.
After the college entrance examination, he was faced with two choices: the first volunteer was accounting, "I want to go out, I always feel that studying accounting can make a lot of money", and the second volunteer is mechatronics to help the farm carry out intelligent transformation. His father gave him two months to intern on farms and other factories. On his own farm, he followed the robot designed by a doctor of mechanical engineering to feed rabbits automatically, and watched the farm realize digital control. The power of science and technology subverted his perception of traditional agriculture and made him see the prospects of agriculture, so he resolutely chose the mechatronics major.
After graduating from college, the other 4 friends in the same dormitory were pulled by Gu Yonghao to devote themselves to agriculture together. In the first month, everyone was very interested. In the second month, the two classmates left the farm one after another. Now, three years later, two other roommates are still working on the farm, one is responsible for maintaining the industrial fish farming area, and the other is learning to work as a farm mechanic. However, one of the classmates also revealed that he wanted to leave and was going to open a café in Pudong.
It is difficult for farms to retain young people, which is an objective and unavoidable dilemma. "To do agriculture is to endure hardships, to bask in the sun, to get mud in the ground, to rotate when the farm is busy, and to endure loneliness. Gu Yonghao said that from the perspective of his peers, he has been "pressed" on the farm at a more playful age, and sometimes he does feel painful. "But then I think about it, it's just as hard as any job. If a young person like me, who has family experience and accumulation, don't do it, what will happen to the future of agriculture?"
After three years of work, Gu Yonghao gradually became a "little Gu Zong", and was independently responsible for industrial fish farming, unmanned farm construction, automatic seedling raising factory, labor education, farmhouse and other agricultural, cultural and tourism businesses. Most of these projects were brought back to the cooperatives after he became the training object of the first batch of rural industry revitalization leaders in Shanghai to cultivate the "head goose" project. During the one-year training period, Gu Yonghao went to major universities across the country to learn agriculture, management and financial knowledge, and inspected cases of circular agriculture, agricultural industry chain and brand building.
As the training object of the "Head Goose" project, the Tengda Rabbit Industry Professional Cooperative where he works has become the preferential object of Shanghai's interest and fee discount policy, which has further reduced the financing cost. With the support of governments at all levels, the cooperative has invested in the construction of photovoltaic glass greenhouses, moved fish ponds into greenhouses, carried out high-density fish farming in internal circulation industrialization, carried out the construction project of rice provenance base, and invested in the construction of 2,500 square meters of constant temperature and humidity plant production workshop. Gu Yonghao, who holds a senior electrician certificate, also followed his father to carry out intelligent transformation of agricultural machinery, and promoted the pilot project of an unmanned farm covering an area of 1,000 acres in full swing. This year, the fully automatic seedling raising integrated factory was officially put into use, and modern equipment such as robotic arms made the whole process of rice planting from seedling raising to transplanting unmanned. "What used to take 11 farmers to work around the clock now can be done with just three university interns flipping the switch on the machine. ”
Gu Yonghao's father, Jin Weifeng, said frankly that after his son came back, the intelligent level of the farm gradually improved. In Gu Yonghao's view, this is the inevitable transformation of agriculture. He has calculated that the investment in the integrated equipment for raising seedlings is nearly 10 million yuan, and the return period will be 10 years or longer; the construction of unmanned farms will need to transform agricultural machinery and upgrade the network communication system. But cooperatives are still willing to make such an attempt, "to make agriculture smarter, easier and more efficient, and also to become a high-tech industry, so that more young people are willing to devote themselves to this career".
After several years of work and study accumulation, he gradually realized that the essence of modern agriculture is a modern factor of production, including not only intelligent systems, but also software such as agricultural marketing and integrated development of agriculture, culture and tourism. Do the high-tech means of cooperatives have the functions of popularizing science and educating people? Can greenhouses, farms, and other spaces play other roles when farming is not working? Can agricultural investment have a long return on investment cycle, and can other industries with fast returns be derived to bridge the gap? In Gu Yonghao's vision, farmers are no longer occupations that can only farm land, and farms should also be transformed from production areas into platforms for "agriculture + N." "In addition to the inherent business, we now have research, cultural tourism, catering, and farm entertainment, making money through the service industry, feeding back agricultural production and farm modernization work, and creating more diversified value. ”
Succeeding his father
The more you dry, the more energetic you get
When the reporter drove from Yueluo Highway to Shuliqiao Village, Luodian Town, Bao Xuemei was already waiting at the door of Shanghai Baoshan Jinlanzi Xinjie Vegetable and Fruit Professional Cooperative. With fair skin, elegant makeup, a black hoodie and trendy shoes, this "post-90s" girl dressed as an urban beauty is actually a farmer. After graduating from university, she took over the baton from her father and ran a cooperative base covering an area of 480 acres. Relying on the quality advantage of the dishes, the cooperative has signed vegetable and fruit supply contracts with many primary and secondary schools in Baoshan and the city, and adopts the order mode of planting according to the varieties demanded by the school, and only one university will send 10 tons of vegetables every day during the peak period.
"I've had a lot of affection for land and farm life since I was a child. However, it's one thing to watch your parents busy, it's another to do it yourself. "The selection and breeding of vegetable seedlings should be controlled, the sowing and picking in the field should be arranged, the transportation and distribution process should be standardized, and the opinions of customers should be fed back in a timely manner...... For Bao Xuemei, every link is a challenge. Because the customer is a college, fresh vegetables must be delivered before preparing breakfast for teachers and students in the canteen every day, so the cooperative usually starts to be busy in the afternoon, and after picking, sorting, cleaning, packing, and weighing the vegetables in the field, they will be delivered in the early morning.
"It's normal to be busy, but you can't be busy. Using the product design concepts she learned in college, Bao Xuemei researched the market and customer needs to completely transform the farm. In 2016, she formulated the implementation plan for the creation of the cooperative standard garden, and successfully created the Baoshan District Vegetable Standard Garden through the simultaneous improvement of software and hardware, and then tried to build a green prevention and control test demonstration base, using physical means such as insect nets, sexual attractants, sticky insect boards, and insecticidal lamps to replace the use of pesticides.
"When you do agriculture, you must take care of the land. Bao Xuemei believes that this is not a slogan. "The land is the same as us, we need to take a breath after a busy day, and we can't work all year round without rest. Taking advantage of the summer vacation of the school in the middle of summer, the cooperative society gave the land a "holiday" to leach the salt in the soil through water irrigation, adjust the salinity of the soil, and prevent the salinization of the land. The reporter also met several "big guys" in the cooperative, namely the Act plant water activator system and the automatic iron and manganese removal filter, all of which were new helpers introduced by Bao Xuemei after taking over the farm. With them, the farm can integrate water and fertilizer.
In the new era of vegetable production, "machine substitution" is the general trend. In 2018, the cooperative built an agricultural machinery warehouse and bought agricultural machinery such as vegetable seeders, vegetable transplanters, cultivators, and self-driving tractors. "When I went to the examination room, I saw that the other students were all the age of their uncles, and when they saw me, they thought it was new and said, 'Little girl, you are here to take this test too.'" ”
This quiet-looking girl is actually "full" in skill points. In addition to driving farm machinery, she also drives trucks and once hauled goods from the wholesale market for two months for the injured driver. In order to ensure the quality of the vegetables sent to the school, she also obtained a pesticide residue tester certificate, and did strict sampling and testing of the dishes that were about to be sent every afternoon. Even if the dishes are purchased on request, samples will be retained for testing, and the test report of each dish will be attached to the supplier.
Recently, the cabbage, lettuce and Hangzhou cabbage grown in the field have passed the certification of the China Green Food Development Center of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, enriching the variety of green products on the farm, which makes Bao Xuemei more confident. "After taking over the cooperative for 9 years, I have no regrets, but I have become more and more energetic. ”
Be a "Female Pilot"
Tired and happy
Three years ago, due to changes in the industry environment, Liu Xiaochang resigned from his job in a vocational education and training institution and rested at home for half a year. Feeling that her state is "worse day by day", she decided to go to her father's ecological agriculture cooperative to help.
That's where she tried to escape. Like most "post-90s" girls, Liu Xiaochang loves beauty, cleanliness, and yearns for the richness of urban life, and farm work seems to be far from these. But seeing her father working all day, both in the field and in the office, she felt that it was time to take on some burdens. Unexpectedly, this "forced transformation" made her more confident and bold.
The cooperative, which has been run by his parents for more than 10 years, has become famous in Huating Town and even Jiading District, and its rice crayfish co-culture and rice soft-shelled turtle co-culture model is mature, and the shrimp rice and turtle rice produced have won many awards. "The older generation is hardworking and hardworking, and our younger generation can also use ingenuity to explore a lot of space in technology-based agriculture and smart farm management. In order to better take over, Liu Xiaochang listed the subjects and content that need to be further studyed, spent several months studying and practicing, and successfully obtained the senior agronomist certificate, agricultural machinery driving license, and civil drone operator certificate issued by the Civil Aviation Pilots Association of China.
With the transformation of agriculture from traditional to modern, plant protection drone operation has gradually become a new skill that new farmers are vying to learn. Liu Xiaochang introduced, taking 100 acres of rice fields as an example, the traditional manual spraying method needs to dispatch several people and do it for a few days, and the use of plant protection drones, 50 liters of medicine box can be filled to spray about 10 acres of land, and it only takes less than 10 minutes to fly once, and the efficiency is greatly improved. At the same time, the contactless mode of spraying with drones also avoids damage to plant seedlings.
After getting this drone operator certificate, Liu Xiaochang and his family are quite proud. In Jiading, there are only a handful of female drone pilots with this certificate, and in Huating, Liu Xiaochang is the only one. In the peak season of outdoor work, pilots have to start work at four or five o'clock in the morning, work until 10 o'clock in the morning, and then be busy from two or three o'clock in the afternoon to seven or eight o'clock in the evening. Liu Xiaochang said that the spraying time of the same field should not be too long, otherwise the temperature difference may have an impact on the growth of the plants, and it must be "a race against time".
In November last year, the town held a farmers' harvest festival, and in addition to shouting for shrimp and rice produced by his cooperative, Liu Xiaochang was also invited to perform a drone flight show. When she operated the drone to pull up the blessing slogan "The warehouse can be expected", there were bursts of applause at the scene. At that moment, she felt that she had fully adapted to and fell in love with farm life.
Liu Xiaochang, who is good at dealing with children, also started parent-child agricultural tourism activities in the spring plowing and autumn harvest season on the farm, and has held more than 40 events in the past two years. From conception to publicity, production of materials, and setting up the venue, she did it all herself. "I used to work in an organization, I had to talk a lot every day, and I was urged to go by performance appraisals, and the whole person was in a state of numbness. That kind of tiredness is difficult to relieve no matter how long you sleep. Now I am tired and happy, and when I wake up, I will be 'full of blood'. Liu Xiaochang said that this is probably the change that doing what you like brings to yourself. (Reporter Wu Yue, Shen Siyi)
China.com
Editor: Xiang Yanhong