Yumen: Mechanization Boosts Agricultural Development

）Recently, over 18000 acres of corn in Huahai Town, Yumen City have entered the harvest period. The harvester roared and galloped happily on the corn field, harvesting abundant fruits. The baler followed suit to ensure timely packaging of the corn straw. The villagers are busy harvesting, packaging, and drying corn, creating a magnificent autumn scene in and out of the village, in front of and behind houses.

This year is really a good year. Our corn is generally high yielding, with a yield of over 1000 kilograms per mu. Each corn stick is golden in color, and the seeds are full. You see, there are harvesters to help us harvest. No matter how much land we plant, there’s no need to worry. “Li Wei, a planter in Huahai Town, pointed to his strange figures shuttling back and forth in the field, saying happily.

Looking in the direction pointed by Li Wei, rows of golden corn waiting to be harvested rustled under the autumn wind in the contiguous corn fields. Accompanied by the “roaring” sound of machines, corn stalks entered the machines one by one, spitting out golden corn and crushed straw powder at the same time. The crushed straw is then sent to a breeding farm to become silage for livestock such as cattle and sheep.

Recently, Qingquan Township has experienced a bumper harvest boom in vegetable production and field vegetables, with the main autumn harvest area of 18519 acres in the township. Five technical personnel conducted on-site surveys in the fields to provide guidance on practical techniques such as straw returning, agricultural film recycling, agricultural machinery operation, and maintenance of agricultural machinery equipment. They guided new agricultural business entities and growers such as large growers and professional farmers’ cooperatives to seize sunny weather, accelerate the progress of autumn harvest, and ensure that crops such as grains, vegetables, and seed production in the entire township receive abundant harvests.

Technology assistance has enabled farmers to transition from skilled farming to “smart” farming. Looking at the fertile fields, intelligent agricultural machinery has been fully popularized, and the unmanned tractors and plant protection drones of the BeiDou satellite navigation system shuttle back and forth, as well as the use of modern equipment such as automatic pest detection and reporting lights, have made agricultural production fully “technological”, with a 100% mechanization rate, freeing more farmers from the land, and achieving a huge transformation from “relying on experience” to “relying on data” in agriculture, Mechanization has also become a modern agricultural demonstration project with new technology, high output, and good benefits in Liuhe.

When talking about the current mechanized operation, Qin Shengsheng, a planter in Hongqi Village, Liuhe Town, said, More than 10 years ago, there was no harvester and a large amount of labor was needed to pick. Two people could barely harvest half an acre of land in a day. Now, mechanized harvesting not only has high work efficiency, but also can automatically screen red and green fruits, reduce rotten fruits, and ensure the quality of tomatoes. A tomato harvester can harvest more than ten acres of tomatoes per day, and a machine can handle dozens of people’s work, greatly saving labor and labor costs.