Modern farming equipment steers Tibet's agriculture

Heavy modern farming equipment has rumbled into a Tibetan county to help with spring ploughing, a move described by local farmers as a "revolutionary" change.

Pempa Dondrup, a grain farmer in Bainang county, Xigaze prefecture, said the new equipment, ranging from tractors to plows and seeding machines, freed Tibetan farmers from manual work and shortened the ploughing period from six weeks to 12 days.

Eastern China's Shandong Province, which has paired up with Bainang, a leading agricultural production base in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, in the country's massive "aid Tibet" project, has donated 4 million yuan (US$636,000) worth of farming equipment to the county this year. That includes 40 tractors and more than 300 seeding machines and reversible plows.

The machinery has been shipped in since March, and Bainang has been named the first Tibetan county to have fulfilled mechanization in farming, said Guo Xiangzheng, deputy chief of the county.

Guo said the county has chosen the most influential farm equipment companies to maintain and operate the heavy machines, explaining, "We have founded 11 cooperative societies to provide consultation and financial services to the farmers and help regulate the market."

The equipment is leased to the farmers in times of ploughing, seeding and harvest, but "the government will subsidize 60 percent of the fees," as Pempa Dondrup says.

In Bainang, the costs of ploughing and seeding each "mu" (a Chinese unit of areas equivalent to 667 square meters) add up to 46 yuan. "The 40 percent that's on the farmers is less than the cost of keeping two heads of cattle," according to Pempa Dondrup, who farms 43 mu of highland barley.

The use of modern farming equipment will bring drastic changes to the Tibet plateau's agriculture, said Guo, who compares its significance to the introduction of iron ploughs in favor of wooden versions in the 1960s.

Guo said the county will plant about 127,400 mu of crops this year, at least 80 percent of which will be ploughed by machines instead of cattle. "More than half of the harvest will be done by machines, too," the official adds.

The change promises higher incomes for local farmers, as effective ploughing by machines will increase harvest yields, said Gao Hongbin, chief of the county's agriculture and herding bureau.

When grain farmers are freed from hard manual work, they will have time for other jobs.

Bainang has set up more than 5,300 vegetable greenhouses, for example. More than 1,500 Tibetan farmers there have learned to grow veg and 39 of them have been invited to teach the skills to farmers in other parts of Xigaze prefecture.

Vegetables do not grow easily on the plateau and therefore have not traditionally had much of a place in Tibetans' diets. Before local farmers learned to grow them, residents relied solely on vegetables trucked in from neighboring Sichuan province.

Today, however, 40 percent of the farmers' income in Pempa Dondrup's village comes from vegetables grown in the village's 108 greenhouses.

"Now that machines are doing most of the work in the field, we can concentrate on growing vegetables in the greenhouses," he said.