Sharing Agricultural Machinery Services To Create A New Garlic Industry Model
The following articles are from the magazine of high-quality agricultural products and China Agricultural Machinery Circulation Association, written by Li Xin, translated by Maria Machinery
Garlic, as an indispensable and important condiment crop in our daily life, has been cultivated for more than 2000 years in China. It has not only a long history of cultivation, but also a large cultivation area and high yield, making China the largest garlic planting and exporting country in the world many years. However, few people know that garlic planting is a very hard work with many procedures, great difficulty and high intensity. The huge labor input has made the garlic industry scale in China enter the development platform period in recent years. Facing the reality that China's urbanization and population aging are accelerating, how to solve this problem in garlic industry has been the focus of the industry.
The world garlic depends on China, and Chinese garlic depends on Jinxiang. In Jinxiang County, Jining City, Shandong Province, the "hometown of garlic", a road that relies on agricultural socialized services to solve the problem of large-scale development is being gradually opened......
01 Crawling forward, it is difficult to grow garlic with manual labor
Jinxiang garlic can be divided into white garlic and purple garlic. It has obvious advantages such as large garlic buld, strong juicy taste, pure spicy taste, crispy and delicious, no loose petals, anti-mildew, anti-rot, and storable. At the same time, the nutritional value of Jinxiang garlic is extremely high. According to the determination of the scientific research department, Jinxiang garlic contains more than 20 kinds of nutrients such as protein, niacin, fat, magnesium, phosphorus, iron, potassium and other nutrients required by the human body, and is called the best natural antibiotic food and health food by experts. The garlic here has a planting history of more than 2,000 years. The annual planting of garlic is 700,000 mu, with an average annual output of 800,000 tons. Its products are widely distributed in more than 170 countries and regions.
More than half of the land in Jinxiang County is used to grow garlic, and "garlic farmers" used to be the occupation that most local people depended on for survival. However, in Jinxiang, there is a well-known saying: "Garlic money is not easy to earn, either kneeling or crawling".
Harvest garlic manually
As garlic seeds need to be kept upright when they fall to the ground, people have to kneel down and "dot" garlic into the ground one by one. This kind of kneeling posture is a typical state of artificial planting and harvesting garlic that garlic farmers gradually find out in the process of planting. Although it is extremely hard, it can effectively improve the efficiency of manual work.
Therefore, the labor cost of garlic planting remains high. In the past, when the degree of garlic mechanization was low, the high cost of labor expenditure per mu reached more than 1500 yuan undoubtedly became a "stumbling block" restricting the development of garlic industry.
02 Replacing labor with machines, mechanized operation has changed the past
For a long time, manual planting has been the only way to ensure that garlic grows neatly and the garlic emerges regularly. Even in the field of agricultural machinery, it is generally believed that the verticle seeding of garlic seeds is a worldwide engineering problem.
The garlic precision seeder jointly produced by Shandong Maria Agricultural Machinery Stock Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Shandong Maria") and Shandong Academy of Agricultural Machinery Science can realize the verticle up bud sowing of garlic seeds through mechanical direction adjustment, which has solved this problem very pertinently.
At the same time, its products are also divided into different models according to different operating scenarios, which are completely applicable to ridge planting or small flat border planting models in Linyi and Lanling regions, ridge planting models in Pingdu regions, flat border planting models in Shandong, Henan, Jiangsu, Hebei and other major garlic producing regions, and also derive models that increase the functions of spraying, laying drip irrigation belts, plastic mulching, and so on. Among them, model 2BUX-11 product can achieve the operation efficiency of 3~4.5 mu/hour. It can sow 11 rows at a time, which can achieve the operation effect of the lowest verticle up bud rate of 90.22% and the rate of leak seeding of 0.94%. In particular, the tractor three-point suspension operation is easy to operate and is deeply loved by farmers.
Not only sowing, but also harvesting garlic is a big problem. Shandong Maria self-propelled combine harvester can realize the functions of digging, cutting and bagging garlic at one time. Several models can be used in most of the geological environment such as silt land and sandy land, and the rate of garlic injury is very low. The cost of harvesting garlic by machine is 600 yuan to 1200 yuan less per mu than that by labor, and the agricultural machinist can earn 4000 yuan to 10000 yuan per day.
Maria Garlic Harvester is harvesting garlic
The mechanized production of garlic has changed the difficulty of "kneeling and climbing" operation of garlic farmers in the past, and significantly reduced the labor cost input. It is estimated that the labor input cost under the whole mechanized operation of 1 hectare garlic is 6025 yuan, which is only 15.57% of the labor input cost under manual operation. It is the key to solving the problem of "difficult and expensive employment" caused by the rising cost of rural labor.
03 Garlic has many "problems" and agricultural machinery is difficult to "land"
The use of agricultural machinery has indeed reduced labor costs and saved time and labor. However, the purchase cost of 2BUX-11 garlic planter and 4DSQ-135A 1.35m wide garlic harvester is high for normal farmers, and the garlic agronomic operation is complex, it includes 9 main links, including base fertilizer application, land consolidation, border pulling, sowing, irrigation, film mulching, pesticide application, garlic bolt harvest and garlic harvest. To realize the whole process mechanized operation, the threshold is not low. However, when large agricultural households or cooperatives with substantial financial resources purchase a set of agricultural machinery, each type of machinery will be used for a few days a year. It is not worth it if the idle time is too long.
In addition, due to the lack of unified garlic planting standards in the past, garlic farmers have different planting patterns, garlic varieties, planting ridge spacing and row spacing are different. At the same time, garlic growers generally have problems such as less garlic planting area, small plot, remote location and irregular shape in some garlic fields. For farmers with small planting area, although the planter that sows 4 mu of land in one hour is highly efficient, it is not worth investing in expensive agricultural machinery just because this huge machine will soon go to the other end when it is driven into the land from one end.
Maria garlic seed planter - bud verticle up type
Qiao Lijuan and Guo Jiaxuan of Hebei Agricultural University once investigated 183 garlic farmers in Shandong Province. The results showed that 90.10% of the garlic farmers had a planting area of less than 250 mu, while only 3 farmers had a planting area of more than 2100 mu. In 183 garlic farmers, the mechanized sowing rate of garlic was 8.74%, and the mechanized harvest rate was only 3.8%.
The survey found that 80.3% of garlic farmers used mechanical operations in film mulching, land preparation and other links, but only 3.8% of farmers used mechanized operations in the whole process. 15.8% of garlic farmers work manually except for irrigation. The main reason why garlic farmers do not use machinery is that "the plot is small and inconvenient" and "the planting scale is small and unnecessary"
04 Open the sharing mode and promote the large-scale development of garlic industry with agricultural machinery
Maria Village Access Comprehensive Agricultural Service Center (hereinafter referred to as the" Service Team ") can effectively solve the problem of low utilization rate of agricultural machinery and small households can not afford to use agricultural machinery." Zhang Detan, Chief Engineer of Agricultural Service Department of Shandong Maria Agricultural Machinery Co., Ltd., introduced at the Agricultural Socialization Service Theory and Practice Forum of the National Agricultural Machinery Circulation Conference in 2022.
What is this "service team"? Zhang Detan further introduced, "For example, a garlic farmer has purchased Maria's planter, and he or she can lease the machine to other garlic farmers in the same village to improve the utilization rate of agricultural machinery and save labor and time costs. Meanwhile, Maria taking the village where the garlic farmer lives as a site, relevant experts will be dispatched to the site for hosting services, thus forming a service team in the form of 'enterprise + cooperative + farmer'."
Maria provides the service teams with integrated solutions such as agricultural material supply, agricultural technology guidance, soil health, germplasm resources, green prevention and control, planting trusteeship, garlic agricultural product trade, garlic functional product research and development and operation, information services, financial support, etc. and service, giving garlic farmers a "reassuring pill" to try a new production model. It has vigorously promoted the whole process of mechanization of garlic and the integrated development of primary, secondary and tertiary industries.
Taking the planting of 1 mu of garlic in Jinxiang County in 2019 as an example, in the planting links such as land preparation, mulching, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, watering, planting, and harvesting, the planting cost of " Service Team " is about 920 yuan, the personal planting cost is about 2920 yuan, and the cost per mu is reduced by 2000 yuan. Service Team has made a great contribution to the cost reduction and efficiency increase of the garlic industry. Service Team has made great contributions to the cost reduction and efficiency increase of garlic industry.
It is reported that in 2018 Maria 2BUX-11 garlic seeds verticle planter sold 824 units, while in 2019 it sold 1161 units, with an annual growth rate of over 40%; The 4DSQ-135A garlic harvester sold 475 units annually, compared with 564 units in 2019, an annual increase of nearly 20%. This figure tells us that agricultural machinery is being widely accepted in the development of garlic industry.
In fact, the whole process of mechanization of garlic will help to concentrate the irregular planting land of garlic farmers, increase the planting area, and then improve the output level of garlic per unit area.
“Generally speaking, the yield of seeding with a seeder is about 5 times higher than that of manual seeding. Mechanical seeding is more in line with industry standards, such as planting 35000 garlic seedlings per mu. When seeding with a seeder, the machine can be adjusted to the specified amount, while manual seeding is generally 20000 plants per mu, with a maximum of 25000 plants. At the same time, the spacing of seedlings seeded by the seeder is more uniform, and the yield will naturally increase." Zhang Detan introduced.
Mechanized sowing realizes fine management of garlic planting and improves the yield per unit area by accurately controlling the row spacing and plant spacing while properly increasing the sowing density of garlic seeds.
At the same time, the mechanized operation of garlic can help improve the benefit of garlic planting. Based on the price of garlic acquisition in 2020, the profit of 1 hectares of garlic planting under artificial operation is only 2580 yuan, which is only 4.3% of the profit level of the full mechanization operation. The entire mechanized operation of garlic helps industrial scale and standardized development.
The machine farming rate of Maria's garlic base in Jinxiang County has reached 100%, buds tip upward seeding rate of garlic mechanical reached 90%, the mechanical sowing accounts for 23 % of the county's garlic area, the harvest rate of garlic mechanical machinery has reached 15 %, and the full -process mechanization rate of garlic production has reached 50.2 %, ranking among the forefront of garlic production areas across the country. In particular, the garlic bud upward seeder has achieved the goal of providing mechanical services to all villages, the garlic sowing has made breakthrough progress. It fundamentally changed the traditional planting method of garlic, so that garlic farmers were liberated from heavy physical labor. It has promoted the connection between small-scale garlic production, agricultural mechanization and agricultural modernization.
"The service team has developed more than 300 garlic planters, more than 70 garlic harvesters and 110 team leaders since its establishment, which can drive and coordinate operations in 10 regions. In 2021, the garlic planters operated in an area of nearly 50000 mu, with an income of more than 9 million yuan. In 2022, more than 50 units of garlic harvesters operate in area of 18600 mu, with an income of more than 3 million yuan." Zhang Detan said, "In the future, Maria will continue to work hard in garlic soil health management scheme, agricultural products trade, online platform operation, etc."
