Technology helps harvesting cotton more efficient in Xinjiang

(ECNS) -- Xinjiang has entered its cotton harvesting season and the pickers are busy shuffling through the vast cotton fields.

A batch of new agriculture technologies, including a BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, unmanned seeding machines, spraying drones and mechanical harvesting have been applied to save farmers time and energy when growing cotton.

Akesu City has always been "the hometown of China's long staple cotton." Good farmland management and mechanized harvesting helped raise the yield of the 50-hectare cotton field there to more than 85 percent and produce better cotton than last year.

With packaging cotton picker and ground cotton picker, farmers can harvest more quickly and thoroughly. In a filed in Yuli County, it only takes seven cotton pickers to finish the work in a month, which used to take over 6,000 people to finish it in 70 days.

In 2021, Xinjiang grew 248 ha of cotton, with a total output of more than 5.2 million tons. The unified model from seed selection, growing, and management levels up the quality and quantity of cotton. The harvesting is expected to be completed in early November.