TAIYUAN, April 25 (Xinhua) -- Ding Chengmin, 66, beamed with excitement as he watched his grandson operate a drone to spray pesticide over a village farm in north China's Shanxi Province.
Ding thought to himself how vastly different this scene was from the spring farming when he was young.
Hailing from the landlocked Wanrong County in Yuncheng City, Ding began doing farm work with his parents as far back as he can remember, and remembers those early years as a bitter chapter of his youth.
"Back then, we had few cattle, let alone machinery," he recalled. "All we had was manpower, with farmers toiling from dawn to dusk in the fields."
It was a time when China's industries were just beginning to take shape, and agricultural mechanization remained a distant dream.
According to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics, the country had fewer than 2,000 tractors in 1952. By 1978, when China launched its reform and opening up, the number of large and medium-sized tractors had increased to 560,000. At that time, however, the overall mechanization level of crop cultivation and harvesting stood at only 17 percent.
Ding recalled that the hardest task each spring back then was applying fertilizer. In the early days, he carried a shoulder pole, going door to door in the village to collect manure before hauling it to the fields. Later, he spent over 100 yuan (equivalent to today's 13.7 U.S. dollars) to buy a trailer, which he had to pull by himself. For his four mu (about 0.267 hectares) of land, he had to make the trip 40 times.
"My shoulders were full of blisters by the end of the day," he said, adding that it usually took him more than 10 days to complete the task.
Tractors began to gain popularity in China's countryside during the 1990s. In 1991, Ding borrowed from relatives and friends 4,000 yuan to buy a small tractor. That same year, the number of large and medium-sized tractors in China reached 788,000, while the country was home to nearly 7.3 million small tractors. Tens of thousands of farmers bid farewell to the plough, an essential tool that had been used in China for centuries.
Agricultural mechanization significantly boosted production efficiency. Soon, the land Ding farmed expanded from four mu to 300, with the wheat yield per mu surpassing 150 kilograms.
Ding's elder son, Quanwei, graduated from middle school in 1998 and became an agricultural machinery operator.
The small tractor could no longer meet the demands of their expanding farm, so it was replaced by a larger one. Quanwei, no longer content with working solely on their own land, began considering offering machinery services to other farmers to earn extra money.
In 2004, the Chinese government announced subsidies for the purchase of agricultural machinery. By 2018, the central government had invested over 200 billion yuan, directly benefiting more than 33 million households.
"The subsidies eased the financial burden on farmers to buy machinery," said Ding Quanwei, adding that he was able to purchase equipment like planters and harvesters. In 2008, he founded a cooperative to provide agricultural machinery services.
Thanks to the machinery, the time needed to sow 10 mu of land went from a week to a single day, while the average wheat yield per mu nearly tripled to 450 kilograms. The cooperative has since expanded, with more than 50 members now carrying out the entire farming process using machinery.
With the passage of time, China entered an era of modernization and industrialization, and the third generation of the family stepped in.
According to Ding Quanwei's son, Ding Zehui, a university graduate majoring in husbandry, smart agriculture was the future, and that rural areas held great potential. With this in mind, he chose to return to the village after graduating last year and became a "new farmer."
Now, as it's time to spray pesticide on the wheat, Zehui's approach is vastly different from his father's. Whereas his father would have driven agricultural machinery to do the job, Zehui simply sets the route for his drone and presses a button.
"Drones are much faster than traditional agricultural machinery," he said. A drone can cover 3,000 mu of crops in a single day. His family has also purchased an unmanned seeder, which, equipped with the BeiDou navigation system, can operate 24 hours a day without stopping, greatly enhancing sowing efficiency.
China's grain output reached a record 706.5 million tonnes last year, marking a 1.6 percent increase from 2023.
Earlier this year, a plan by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council outlined the goal of making significant progress in strengthening the country's agricultural capabilities by 2027. According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the comprehensive mechanization rate for crop cultivation, planting, and harvesting in China is expected to reach 75 percent by this year.
"Replacing human labor with machinery is just the first step in agricultural modernization," said Zehui. "Today, smart agriculture is developing rapidly. Digital planting, robot operation, and big data monitoring are the tools we, as the new generation of farmers, are using." ■