Keeping grain in barns makes life happier

For Chinese who remember what it was like to live with famine, like 95-year-old farmer Dai Geniu in central China's Henan Province, they firmly believe grain reserve is the lifeblood of their families and that of the nation.

Dai keeps 100 kg of crops that her family harvest in her granary every year. She learns the importance of grain storage not only from her experience in wars and famine but also from history.

Some 100 km away from her house in the countryside of Xinzheng, archeologists have unearthed the 1,400-year-old Huiluo Granary made up of 700 storage pits built as a major state grain storage in the Sui Dynasty (581-618), which can hold 192.5 million kg of grain.

Nowadays, Henan Province, with 9,000 years of agricultural history, serves as not only an important granary in China but also a global supplier of crops. In 2018, made-in-Henan farm produce was exported to dozens of countries including Canada and France.

China feeds 22 percent of the world's population, with only 7 percent of the arable land on Earth. From 1949 to 2018, China's total grain output rose by nearly five times from 113 million tonnes to 658 million tonnes, keeping the country's 1.4 billion population self-sufficient in food.

Dai recalled that in 1942, a drought intertwined with floods, locust plagues and other natural disasters struck Henan in which 3 million people died of hunger.

The province's farmland on the alluvial plain in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River is prone to floods. Since 1952, the provincial government started to build an irrigation system diverting water from the river to farmland. In 1955, national projects were launched to tame the river with hydropower facilities and reinforced embankments.

Since then, the province's grain output has increased steadily.

In 2005, starting from the village of Nanliang in Henan, the government exempted grain growers from paying agricultural tax. That year, the tax-cut helped save 900,000 yuan (nearly 130,000 U.S. dollars) to farmers in the village.

At the beginning of each year since 2004, the "No. 1 central document," the first policy statement released by central authorities, has been dedicated to agricultural and rural development.

Encouraged by the favorable policies, Jia Yunfei, a farmer who had been away from his farm to work in cities for 20 years, returned home to Dancheng County, Henan, in 2017 to resume grain farming. Now he contracts a farm covering 133 hectares.

There are 123,000 rural cooperatives and 47,000 big grain growers in Henan, guarding the province's grain output.

In 2018, Henan yielded 66.5 billion kg of crops, 9.32 times that in 1949. The province boasts 800,000 hectares of high-quality wheat planting area, ranking first in the country.

Ren Xishan, a rural official in Xincai County, said with abundant harvests, the provincial government aims to improve the industrial crop chain of supply, purchasing and processing, to increase the added values of grain products.

The sector has become one of the province's economic drivers. Amid a backdrop of a nationwide economic slowdown in 2018, the sector in Henan achieved annual growth of 8.6 percent in revenue and a 14.3 percent increase in profit.