The aging of the population forces China's agriculture to turn to intelligence

Intelligentization is the way out for future agriculture

Many people are beginning to worry that China will enter an aging society without completing the modernization of agriculture and industry. Will it be "not getting rich first"? Who will cultivate a large amount of cultivated land in the future? Today, Agricultural Machinery has brought an article about the impact of the disappearance of the demographic dividend on agriculture and the future of agricultural development.

A few days ago, I went to visit a 4,000-acre pepper planting base. I just met an expert to give lectures to the workers. When taking photos in the training room, there was a white flower head under the flash. It is true that these workers are all over the age of 50, the silver-haired old people in their early 60s, and most of them are women, because most of the older men go to work in the city.

This is the status quo of China's agricultural labor force. There is almost no need to turn the population roster of the Bureau of Statistics, nor do you need to do complex data modeling analysis. As long as you go to the countryside, you will understand that the shortage of agricultural labor and the aging of the population have become dangerous. edge!

A country's economy needs to develop, an industry needs to develop, and the population problem is a key factor. I don't use the word talent here, because in the narrow sense, talents refer to those who have mastered cultural knowledge or have some expertise. Agricultural production requires not only experts or technical experts, but a population with a full factor, that is, not only experts, skilled workers, capitalists, but also a large number of agricultural workers.

These agricultural workers are not necessarily culturally diverse. They only need to master simple skills. They can start the machine or pick up apples and other skills. But the Chinese agricultural population is now facing a general shortage of all factors, especially the basic agricultural workers. It is more than the worst.

It is predicted that the agricultural population will still flee the countryside at a rate of 5 million a year in the future. After the 13th Five-Year Plan, the shortage of agricultural labor will be more serious than the problem of China's aging population. Ten years later, the existing old-age labor force will generally exceed 70 years old, if you are engaged in agricultural investment, such a grandfather's workers, do you dare to use it? Do you have the heart to call them? Are you still willing to invest in capital to train them?

If the agricultural industry is to develop, it must have a large number of people to support it, otherwise it will not develop into a system-complete industry.

The fall of the former Soviet Union, and 30 years later, Russia still has not emerged from the economic stagnation because their population base is too small, and the population is small, they can only develop heavy industry and resource industries, and they cannot achieve balanced development of all walks of life. It is even more impossible to use a large number of talents to develop agriculture. So Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, Mongolia and other countries have vast and flat and fertile land, but these countries are still backward in agricultural development, not food is not enough to eat vegetables. There is a shortage of fruits and vegetables, but this is all thanks to the serious shortage of labor.

Then China's agriculture needs to develop, how to solve the labor problem? How can a large number of people with all factors come to plant crops? In recent years, the concept of “new farmers” has been proposed, which means attracting and cultivating a large number of young people with scientific knowledge to farm. Others say that as the countryside gets better and better, the urban labor force will Moving to the countryside, the labor force that originally entered the city will also return, but the author is pessimistic about the above views for three reasons.

If you look at the neighbors, the situation is still not optimistic.

Looking at the industrial history of Europe, Britain, France, Germany, the United States, and Japan and South Korea in Asia, the trend of rural labor migration to industry, service industry, and information industry has been increasing in the process of industrialization and agricultural modernization. No change. As of today, there is still no return of industrial and service talents to agriculture. On the contrary, aging and labor loss are a difficult problem for agricultural development in these countries.

The urbanization process will only make more and more farmers leave the land

At present, China's urbanization rate is over 50%. According to the “13th Five-Year Plan”, by 2020, China's urbanization rate will exceed 60%, indicating that more than 100 million laborers will still be lost from rural areas. Urbanization is economic development. The inevitable, relative to the rural areas, cities can better solve employment, hospitals, education, security and other issues, and these are lack of rural areas.

So hard to plant, who is willing to go back?

Agriculture is not a low-yield and low-profit industry, but agriculture requires long-term investment, high risks, large investment, and slow effect is his inherent characteristics. Coupled with the problem of land ownership, the existing land can only be The transfer of the right to use, and the complete transfer of ownership will be a restricted area, and successive governments do not want to touch this "life gate." “There is no perseverance for those who have no permanent production.” If the land problem is not resolved, it will be decided whether it is capital to the countryside, science and technology farming, or elite farming. These people are opportunists at best, but the policy has changed or has other The wind and the wind will move, these people will be evacuated from the countryside, and the time left for the countryside will be a mess.

Therefore, the author judges that China's agricultural development depends on “new farmers” or urban agricultural power transfer or rural labor return is mostly unreliable. So how do you solve the problem of agricultural labor? The author believes that attention should be shifted from people to machines and technology, with a focus on intelligence and driverlessness!

Intelligentization is the use of industrial robots, agricultural robots, service robots or related equipment and technology to replace a large number of people's labor. Unmanned driving is not even a robot, let the machine work according to the program designed beforehand.

The current concept of robotics and driverless driving is very popular in the industrial and automotive industries. However, the author believes that backward agriculture requires intelligent robots and unmanned technology compared to these highly developed industries. The attractiveness of the labor force is also the main field of absorbing talents. The development of robots and driverlessness, in addition to reducing costs and improving competitiveness, is to reduce the labor intensity of people and make people and work more comfortable, while agricultural production is Deciding whether China’s 1.3 billion people have food and food is a question of determining whether the country’s society is stable and whether it can last long.

In fact, the intelligent production of agriculture and the unmanned driving in agricultural production are not a myth. For example, Academician Luo Xiwen of South China Agricultural University promoted unmanned tractors ten years ago. Nanjing Agricultural Mechanization Institute is developing strawberry picking robots, China. Yituo, Futian Heavy Industries and other enterprises also have prototype products of self-driving tractors, but the application of new technologies and the promotion of new products require the attention and cooperation of the whole society, but with the transfer of land, the development of large-scale agriculture and the rapid development of capital to the countryside. Advancing, coupled with the reduction of labor force and population aging, the catalysis of positive and negative forces, the intelligentization of agriculture and the era of unmanned agricultural production equipment will come early.

This will be our second chance for farmers. If the sub-agricultural revolution is to replace people with machines (in fact, the machine part replaces human labor, and has never really liberated, such as the micro-cultivator solves the problem of farming cattle and is exhausted), then the second agriculture The revolution must be the replacement of the machine itself with humans by robots.

In other words, in the future, the development of China's agriculture must fully consider how to use intelligent and automated machinery and equipment to ensure food security after the disappearance of the demographic dividend. “New farmers” and “autopilot” are the way out for future agriculture.