Thinking: Where is the last mile of mechanization of corn harvesting?

[ China Agricultural Machinery Industry News ] The good days of the corn machine market have continued for 10 years, from 2005 to 2015. I admit that it took the industry 10 years to develop an ear-type harvester from sample to mass production, and established a corn planting production model with Chinese characteristics. Until 2016, the corn machine fell off the cliff, the industry had to rethink the original proposition, where is the last one kilometer of corn harvesting?

Thinking: Where is the last one kilometer of corn harvest mechanization?

In fact, the industry also knows that Western and European and American development is a grain harvester. Of course, people's production mode is large-scale planting. The two models of the ear machine and the grain machine have decided two different production modes. It is said that agricultural machinery and agronomy have to adapt to each other, which is another typical case. The nature of the comparison between the two models is not the difference between the harvesting methods, nor the difference in the technical route of the products. Behind it is the competition between the two production modes.

Then, from the ear machine to the grain machine, it should not be one kilometer after the corn harvest mechanization is completed, but start from scratch. Fundamentally speaking, it is to realize the transformation, upgrading and integration of the corn production and management model.

Good day

China's corn harvesting pilot began around 2005, mainly to solve the problem of rural labor shortage. The technical plan is to promote the piggyback and self-propelled earring models. In the same year, the Ministry of Agriculture chose Shandong and Hebei provinces to carry out pilot subsidies for corn harvesting. At that time, the national corn machine yield was less than 3%. After that, the pilot provinces were expanded year by year, and in 2007, they expanded to nine provinces. %; 10 years later, in 2015, the national machine level increased to 63%.

In other words, we spent 10 years, basically realized the mechanization of corn harvesting, using a business vocabulary, the corn machine market changed from “blue sea” to “red sea”; during the period of industry reshuffle, a group of advantageous enterprises grew up. The rules of the market have been perfected; and many problems in product manufacturing have been solved one after another, such as the speed of work, the rate of spikes in the ears, the rate of peeling of the leaves, the rate of grain breakage, the total loss rate, the pass rate of straw crushing length, etc., in agriculture. In the mechanical map, a product line has matured.

However, with the decline in corn prices in the market in 2015, after 10 years of good weather, the corn machine market has come to a critical crossroads, and there has been a decline. In 2016, it is a cliff-like approach. Jump down. why? The root cause is that our corn planting production costs are too high, the production and operation mode is backward, and the international competitiveness is too weak. To this day, the industry is hard to believe that the 10 years of corn planting, the enthusiasm of farmers is so high, is it thanks to the protection of the national temporary reserve policy?

"even rainy"

Is this just the tip of the iceberg? In 2016, many major events that affected the overall situation, stepped on the brakes for the fast-moving corn machine market.

First, the Central Document No. 1 proposed the reform of the agricultural supply side structure. The Ministry of Agriculture listed the adjustment of corn structure in 17 provinces and autonomous regions in the “sickle bend” area as the main content of agricultural structure adjustment, and proposed to use the “sickle bend” area as the main area, supplemented by the Huanghuaihai area, and implement “grain change feed” and “rice reform”. Beans, plans to reduce the corn planting surface by 52 million mu by 2020, and in 2016 it will exceed 30 million mu, and in 2017 continue to reduce 10 million mu. The intensity is large and the scope is wide.

Second, the nine-year corn storage policy has been withdrawn from the historical arena. In 2007, the state implemented the temporary corn storage and storage policy in the three northeastern provinces and Inner Mongolia. The original intention was to encourage corn cultivation in the main producing areas to ensure national food security. However, after 2011, the prices of international agricultural products, including corn, plummeted, while the price of Chinese corn storage increased year by year, resulting in large imports of foreign corn and its substitutes. Domestic stocks continued to accumulate and corn was seriously oversupply. Objectively speaking, it seems that the national temporary storage policy has become the main reason for the distortion of the market price signal, which makes it difficult to form a grain price mechanism. Actually, it is a comprehensive reflection of the corn industry chain problem in the market. Therefore, making timely adjustments is interpreted as a breakthrough in agricultural supply-side reform.

The third is the ravages of the El Niño phenomenon. Since 2015, it has been an active period of El Niño in the meteorology. The weather in the leading end is frequent and the climate is extremely chaotic. The country has experienced severe spring drought and summer drought. In the northern winter wheat area, the spring drought is severe. After the summer, the northeastern region, the northwestern region, and the north China region experienced severe summer drought, and the area affected by drought reached 77.22 million mu. In particular, drought has occurred in Inner Mongolia for many years. Hulunbeier, Xing'an League and Tongliao suffered severe drought. In 2016, the corn was completely rejected, and all of them had to be changed to silage.

The corn machine market suffered from Waterloo, and it came so suddenly that the industry seemed to be caught off guard. The original consensus was that after the peak of the fruit machine reached its peak in 2015, there should be an inflection point in 2016, and a small fall is expected. However, under the superposition of multiple factors such as structural adjustment, persistent drought, and low food prices, the corn machine was sandwiched between the “ceiling” and the “floor” and lost space. The actual situation of the market is even more terrible.