Jiwei Farm busy cultivating rice seedlings

At the foot of Lianhua Mountain in Jiwei Town, Huayuan County, Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, villagers were busy plowing and cultivating seedlings.

“It is now a good time for rice transplanting. The prepared soft soil that can hold water well provides a good growth environment for seedlings,” said a villager from Yelangping Village in Jiwei Town. In the Jiwei Farm, the seeds produced by the 3D seeder in the early stage have now grown into green seedlings in white greenhouses.

Ran Jinghui, a senior agronomist at the Agriculture and Rural Bureau of Huayuan County, said that in recent years, Jiwei Town has made every effort to promote the 3D targeted positioning seeding technology and machine transplanting technology of rice, so as to reduce labor costs and improve the survival rate of seedlings. This year, the cultivated seedlings are available for more than 2,800 mu (186.67 hectares) of land. Jiwei rice is well-known far and wide. The town is located in the eastern border of the the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau and the hinterland of Wuling Mountain, with an average altitude of more than 800 meters, and has unique mountain ecological conditions. There is abundant sunshine and water sources, and the growth cycle of rice lasts from April to September, a month longer compared to that in plain areas. It is cool in summer and prone to fog and dew due to a large temperature difference between day and night, which is conducive to the accumulation of organic matter. So the rice is full, sweet, and chewy.

Long Pinde, a major planter in Jiwei Town, transferred more than 300 mu (20 hectares) of rice fields to plant high-quality Jiwei rice and provided socialized agricultural machinery services for more than 8,000 mu (533.33 hectares) of crops. He has explored a new way of agricultural mechanization in mountain areas and won the title of “National Agricultural and Rural model worker”. Jiwei Town has been rich in rice since ancient times. In 1953, Jiwei Farm was a military reclamation farm, which was transformed into a local farm later. It has taken active action to promote rice variety experiments and agricultural technology application in the Hunan-Guizhou border region. Since the Ming Dynasty, high-quality Jiwei rice has been loved by the people and sold well at home and abroad.

In recent years, Jiwei Town has stepped up efforts in the construction of high-standard farmland and a 1,066.67-hectare contiguous high-quality commodity grain production base has been built.

It has undertaken the promotion and testing of rice varieties in scientific research institutions such as Hunan Agricultural University, Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and Xiangxi Prefecture Academy of Agricultural Sciences. It has made every effort to promote agricultural technologies such as greenhouse centralized seedling cultivation, machine planting and harvesting, and drone fertilization.

It has also cultivated brand rice processing enterprises such as “Jishun Rice” and “Chongshan Tribute Rice” and formed a food industry chain involving farmer planting, enterprise processing, production and sales.

The town now has 16,000 mu (1066.67 hectares) of high-quality rice, with an annual output of 4.8 million kilograms of rice, an output value of 38 million yuan, and a profit of 19.2 million yuan, which has driven 13,000 people to increase their income.