Aerial photo taken on April 19, 2022 shows a seeding machine guided by the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System working in a cotton field in a farm of a division of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (Xinhua/Ding Lei)
BEIJING, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) on Tuesday launched an initiative to strengthen scientific and technological innovation in agricultural machinery and equipment.
The initiative aims to accelerate the mechanized, intelligent and green development of agricultural production to provide solid equipment support for ensuring the country's food security and high-quality agricultural and rural development.
Focused on solving the key problems of agricultural machinery and equipment, the initiative calls for enhancing scientific and technological research on efficient, intelligent and green agricultural machinery.
The initiative is centered on intelligent production equipment for major food crops, self-sufficiency of key and core technologies in production equipment for cotton and oil bulk cash crops, and the comprehensive eradication of weak links, and development of regional production equipment.
It calls for targeted scientific and technological breakthroughs in key equipment and technologies such as bulk crops, facility agriculture, and hilly and mountainous areas.
China's grain production has achieved a bumper harvest for 18 consecutive years with the strong support of agricultural machinery and equipment and agricultural mechanization, according to Wu Kongming, president of the CAAS.
The initiative is an important measure to accelerate the scientific and technological innovation of agricultural machinery and equipment in the country, Wu said.
The country's agricultural machinery and equipment innovation capacity has improved in recent years, and the overall mechanization rate of crop cultivation has exceeded 71 percent, said Chen Qiaomin, director of the Nanjing Institute of Agricultural Mechanization of the CAAS.
However, there are still problems such as the lack of agricultural machinery in hilly and mountainous areas, Chen noted.
Wu called for promoting key research tasks such as scientific and technological research on efficient and intelligent green agricultural machinery, collaborative innovation of agricultural machinery science and enterprises, and upgrading of agricultural machinery innovation platforms.
The CAAS will strive to realize leap-forward development of China's agricultural machinery equipment and agricultural mechanization technology by 2030, Wu said, adding that it will set up an intelligent agriculture and equipment science center.
