Quang Ngai Province has a large agricultural production area, with more than 122,000 hectares of land used for farming. During the production season, the province often faces a shortage of labour, which affects productivity and product quality.
According to the Quang Ngai Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, the mechanisation of agriculture in the locality is still low and uneven among stages of production.
The processing and preservation of farm produce have not yet been mechanised. Regarding rice production in particular, mechanisation is only applied in the land preparation and harvesting stages, while the sowing and care stages are still done manually.
Deputy Director of the Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development Nguyen Quang Trung said that the main reason for the unsynchronised application of mechanisation is primarily attributed to the small and scattered local production land, limited production infrastructure, and backward internal transportation system. Not to mention, local people show less interest in investing in machinery and equipment because of high costs.
Other reasons lie in the absence of preferential policies to encourage the coordination between businesses and farmers to consume products and the difficulties facing businesses, cooperatives, households and individuals in accessing loans to purchase machinery and equipment for agricultural production.
Facing these obstacles, the provincial agricultural sector has identified that accelerating the application of advanced technologies in production is an inevitable requirement, where mechanisation is the top priority.
Statistics have shown that mechanisation in agricultural production in Quang Ngai Province is currently applied in the stages of land preparation, fertilisation, irrigation, harvesting and post-harvesting.
The province now has 3,637 tillage equipment - an increase of 1,672 machines compared to 2016, with 1,379 motorised sprayers, nearly 1,000 combine harvesters, and 141 maise sheller machines.
Since 2021, Loc Troi Group has cooperated with seed production companies and agricultural cooperatives such as Duc Hoa, Duc Thang, and Duc Nhuan (Mo Duc District), Pho Van Agricultural Cooperative (Duc PhoTtown) to launch drones for spraying pesticides on rice plants.
In addition, the Provincial Agricultural Extension Centre has deployed many mechanisation models, notably the application of mini tillers in mountainous and island districts and straw rollers in some plain districts.
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Quang Ngai Province now has nearly 1,000 combine harvesters (Photo: kinhtedothi.vn) |
Straw rollers help reduce labour, collecting post-harvest products while ensuring product quality for good and convenient use in livestock farming, reducing costs. It only costs 1.2 million VND/ha, reducing 4.8 million VND/ha compared to manual straw harvesting, so farmers are very excited to use the machine in production.
Mo Duc District is a leading locality in applying mechanisation in agricultural production in Quang Ngai Province, with the mechanisation rate in land preparation and harvesting by combine harvester reaching 100% and spraying pesticides reaching 90%.
According to Vice Chairman of the District People's Committee Nguyen Van Thanh, there are currently two forms of mechanisation application service in the district. Firstly, private households, enterprises and agricultural farms invest in purchasing machinery and equipment to serve their own demand. Second, agricultural cooperatives form a mechanised service model integrating production stages such as land preparation, sowing, care, and harvesting.
Production practice has proven that the linked mechanised service model brings high efficiency, promotes mechanisation in production, reduces labour costs, meets intensive farming processes, and contributes to increasing economic efficiency in production.
Agricultural mechanisation has helped to increase profits by 15-20% compared to previous manual work and solve the problem of seasonal labour shortages in rural areas, said Vice Chairman Nguyen Van Thanh.
As one of the pioneering cooperatives in coordinating with enterprises to apply agricultural mechanisation for many years, the Director of Duc Thang Agricultural Service Cooperative, Le Tuan Trinh, said that the application of drones to spray herbicides and pesticides on rice plants has received much praise from farmers because it reduces the amount of pesticides, reduces production costs and protects the health of workers.
Although the agricultural production mechanisation in Quang Ngai has achieved encouraging results, the rate of some stages is still low and uneven, mainly focusing on rice plants in the land preparation and harvesting stages, while the sowing stage is still very low. Particularly, the intensive cultivation, processing and preservation stages have not been mechanised and are mainly done manually.
To address the shortcomings, the agricultural sector of Quang Ngai Province has proposed many solutions, such as expanding large-scale rice fields, encouraging households to invest in purchasing machinery suitable for local production conditions, and promulgating favourable policies to support agricultural production.
The sector has also worked to build chain links between enterprises and farmers to enhance human resources to serve agricultural mechanisation, promoting the shift from agricultural production to developing a commodity agricultural economy, and creating an important premise for building modern high-technology agriculture.
