The 6th international forum of organic agriculture of the Chehe community, themed “Organic agriculture and high quality development”, was recently held in Datong of north China’s Shanxi Province, gathering related experts and scholars to discuss the development of organic agriculture.
Experts pointed out that developing organic agriculture is an important move to boost high quality development of Shanxi agriculture featuring organic dry farming. The organic agriculture model in Chehe, a village-level community in Lingqiu County of Datong, is an outcome of planning in advance, industrial support, market operation and social participation.
With an arable land of 1,213 mu (about 0.81 square kilometers) among its 27 square-kilometer area, Chehe, where farming is a major source for income, has 32 registered poor households involving 77 of its 182 villagers.
Based on the natural ecological resource advantages and with the pilot Chehe organic agriculture comprehensive development project, Lingqiu has been striving to build organic agriculture parks since 2013.
By adopting the development mode of “organic agriculture plus ecotourism plus village reconstruction”, it has encouraged the county’s largest key industrial enterprise to invest in organic agriculture, establish a company specializing in the management of organic agriculture, and carry out organic farming, breeding and other agricultural transformation projects.
Land transfer has played an important role in Chehe’s construction, bringing income for the villagers covering land transfer, tourism services, labor services and company surplus dividends.
So far, the transfer of the 1,213 mu of arable land has been finished in Chehe where 200 mu (about 0.13 square kilometers) of land has been newly developed, 500 mu (about 0.33 square kilometers) of land has been renovated, and 700 mu (about 0.47 square kilometers) of organic farming of coarse cereals, vegetables, etc. has been developed.
Serving as a communication platform for organic agricultural practitioners, the Chehe international forum of organic agriculture has not only collected the wisdom of experts and scholars, but also helped Lingqiu to attract investment, changing the impoverished mountainous area in ideological concepts and industrial formats, said Zhang Qiang, Party chief of Lingqiu County and deputy director of the Standing Committee of Datong Municipal People’s Congress.
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Source: Xinhua Silk Road Information Service
