Bumper harvest helped by intelligent agriculture

The Beidahuang Agricultural Reclamation Group, a State-owned enterprise in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, announced on Oct 17 that it had finished harvesting its 3 million hectares.

This is expected to be the group's 18th consecutive bumper year, with an estimated grain harvest of over 23 million metric tons, 1.5 million more than last year.

Thanks to a succession of bumper harvests in recent years, China has ample supplies of its main agricultural products and has ensured basic self-sufficiency in cereal grains, as well as absolute overall grain security, officials said.

Beidahuang is the name used to designate the fertile region, including the Sanjiang Plain along the Heilong and Nenjiang rivers, in the north of Heilongjiang.

In 1947, before the founding of the People's Republic of China, a group of military cadres from Yan'an and nearby Nanniwan in Shaanxi province led troops to the region to develop what would later become the first State-owned farms.

In 1976, the Heilongjiang Agricultural Reclamation Bureau was founded. In 2018, it became the Beidahuang Agricultural Reclamation Group, marking its transformation from State management to a mix of collectivization and enterprise.

Thanks to generations of effort and sacrifice, Beidahuang has seen rapid rises in annual grain output, from 2,400 tons when farming began there to 21.5 million tons last year.

Taking this year's expected harvest into account, Beidahuang will have produced more than 500 million tons of grain for the country since the region was developed in the 1950s.

In recent years, the Beidahuang Agricultural Reclamation Group has been working hard on three main tasks: protection of the area's rich black soil, research and development of its seed industry and digital agricultural services.

It has set up 10 key demonstration areas for soil protection.

On over 2.8 million hectares of the group's farmland, stalks are left intact after harvest rather than being burned, which helps protect the soil. The group has also increased investment in science and technology, swapping traditional agriculture for modern, intelligent agriculture.

With the help of big data collection and collation, it has created a digital agricultural service platform, providing information that can be used to manage the process of intelligent planting and enhance brand value.

Beidahuang has achieved a 99 percent mechanization rate on arable land and is making increasing use of advanced technology.

During this year's harvest, 3,187 agricultural machines were used at Jiangchuan, a State-owned farm that is part of the group's Hongxinglong Company.

"We finished harvesting the 20,000 hectares of arable land that are used to grow rice on Oct 10," said Zhou Qiao, a member of the farm's publicity department. "And we achieved a 99 percent harvesting mechanization rate."

By 2025, the group is expected to take the lead in realizing agricultural modernization in the country, with the goal of achieving comprehensive grain production capacity of 25 million tons.