CHINA is trying to make rural life appealing and profitable for disaffected young farmers who migrate to cities, leaving villages deserted. Wu Qi reports on a "new breed" of professional farmer.

China is going to great lengths to foster a "new breed" of professional farmer to inhabit the empty farmhouses across its vast rural areas and entice more migrant workers to return home to till fields and feed the world's largest population.

It's all about uplifting the countryside, raising standards of living and education and providing business opportunities. The problem of "left-behind" children, too, must be solved; today many are raised solely by elderly relatives in empty villages after their parents migrate to cities for work.

If efforts succeed, China will solve a major problem that cropped up after its urbanization process resulted in a population split 50:50 between rural and urban areas. Decades ago, nine in 10 people lived in rural areas, where their hard lives were far different from those of urban residents.

As large numbers of farmers, especially young farmers, have flocked to cities and towns, they've left the countryside largely inhabited by the elderly, women and children.

This mass exodus from the countryside has left China asking, "Who will till the farmlands and feed 1.3 billion Chinese people?"

This question, as well as a host of possible solutions, was discussed at length during the 12th National People's Congress (NPC), the country's legislature.

On March 5, former Premier Wen Jiabao offered a possible solution in his government work report: adopting effective measures to stabilize the forces for agricultural production and actively foster a new type of farmer in rural areas.

Empty farmhouses

Chinese farmers often choose to leave their hometowns and migrate to cities and towns to fulfill their dreams of becoming "townspeople," an appellation that seems to promises a better life for their families and more education opportunities for their children.

Li Liancheng, a national legislator from Xixinzhuang Village, Puyang City, in central China's Henan Province, said, "The dreams of us farmers are simple - to dress warm and eat our fill, to have a good school nearby for children, a home near a credible hospital and jobs in nearby towns."

Though the realities of urban life are not usually the stuff of dreams, many young farmers stick it out, unwillingly to abandon their hopes for a better life.

Over the past three decades, nearly 260 million migrant workers have settled in cities and towns, 23 percent of the total urban population.

Xu Xilong, governor of Gansu Provincial Branch of the Agricultural Bank of China and a national legislator, estimates that about 13 million rural residents move to towns and cities annually.

Zhou Tianyong, a professor with the Party School of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, forecasts that over the next three decades, 400 million to 500 million rural residents will relocate to towns and cities.

As a consequence of this large-scale migration, rural areas are now short of laborers to work on farmlands, particularly young and experienced farmers, says Cai Fang, professor on population studies with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as well as a national legislator.

During the National People's Congress, the Jiu San Society, a non-Communist Party political organization, published an investigation showing that although rural areas increase lands reserved for farmers to build homes by 1 percent each year, a quarter of rural homes are empty year-round. Rural permanent residents are declining at an annual rate of 1.6 percent.

In a recent survey of four villages, Liu Hongmin, chairman of a rural cooperative in Xixia City, east China's Shandong Province, found that 57 percent of village residents surveyed were over age 50; men in their prime, normally under 45, made up only 20 percent of the farmers there. Less than 15 percent of rural residents earned a living only by farming and male farmers accounted for less than 7.5 percent of village laborers in the four villages.

These days, agricultural machinery is widely used in farming, but this is problematic for elderly farmers.

"Farmers in their 60s or even 70s start to have feeble feet and poor technical skills. It is dangerous for them to operate such machines," says Liu.

A new kind of farmer

China is studying ways to address the rural labor shortage.

Some large companies based in major cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing in Jiangsu Province, have shown strong interest in starting businesses on farmland leased from farming collectives.

But these profit-oriented companies are not trustworthy in the eyes of rural farmers, says Li Liancheng, the national legislator from Henan.

"These companies seek to maximize profits. Planting crops makes meager profits. People doubt whether they would set their hearts on cultivating farmlands for long," says Li.

"I prefer to see scattered farmlands transferred to the hands of professional farmers for production," says Li. "This also helps ensure food safety at the very source."

Li's opinions have been echoed by other legislators and political advisers attending the NPC session and that of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the top political advisory body.

"The government should create a more favorable environment to guide farmers to evolve from old-fashioned field-tillers to a 'new type' of professional farmers. It will markedly resolve China's labor shortage problem in rural areas," says Zhang Xiaoshan, a national legislator as well as a professor with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The new breed of professional farmers, as Zhang put it, is able to meet the demands of modern production and operation in rural areas. They cultivate grains or cash crops on household farms, he explains.

"Unlike traditional farmers, the new professional farmers go well beyond tilling farmlands. They are investors, managers and decision-makers," says Zhang.

Experimental programs are underway in some regions to foster these new professional farmers.

Since March 2012, farmers in Tianchang City, Anhui Province, who cultivated more than 20 hectares for more than five years are encouraged to register as single-investor, individually owned companies. The local government helps them overcome operational problems, such as outdated technologies and poor management, so they can compete in the market as professional businesses.

So far, the city has registered 80 such farming companies across 60,000 mu (4,000 hectares) of farmland, nearly 70 percent of the large-scale agricultural development in Tianchang.

Over the past two months, Mao Shirong, a 50-year-old farmer-turned-farm business owner, has been busy preparing rice seeds and farming facilities for the upcoming spring planting season.

"The central government has encouraged us to be decisive and bold in running household farms. I will work on it heart and soul," says Mao.

He referred to the central government's first policy document for 2013, dubbed the "No. 1 central policy," which explicitly encourages governments at all levels to support big specialized farms, farming households and farming cooperatives, which are seen as the "new type" of rural production bodies.

"We have adopted the corporate operations mode and become equal market players," says Mao. "Having visions of making profits from farming will help us in the long term."

Mao and the farmers behind 50 other companies like his have united into the Dadi Cooperative, which helps members purchase agricultural facilities and services at lower prices, via a group buying mechanism.

"We have settled with the municipal seed company to buy paddy rice seeds at 10 yuan per kilogram cheaper than the market price," says Jiang Jinfu, deputy chief of the Dadi Cooperative.

The cooperative is planning a training course for its members, and it expects to help them obtain more bank loans.

"In the early stages, we invested heavily in renting farmland from separate farmers. We often run short on circulating capital when it comes time to buy production materials and farming tools. We help each other by lending tens of thousands of yuan among us for a short period. But it is far from enough," says Mao.

Jiang, who has worked in the agricultural sector for over 30 years, has great expectations for future prosperity using this approach.

"Registering the farmers as owners of household farming companies is only a change in the form of farming operations. We hope the government extends training and policy support to help the new kind of professional farmers change substantially," says Jiang.

Other regions have also experimented with similar schemes. Northwest China's Shaanxi Province has vowed to give priority to fostering more big household-based farms, agricultural machinery service providers and farmers "in their prime." It aims to cultivate 220,000 professional farmers by 2015.

During a panel discussion of the NPC session, Yu Xinrong, deputy minister of agriculture, said, "These experiments are in line with the orientation of future rural development. Our ministry is establishing policies to support the experiments."

Of China's estimated 279 million rural laborers currently working on farmland, only about 10 million receive systematic farming training each year.

In August, the Ministry of Agriculture decided to experiment with fostering the new breed of professional farmer in 100 counties across the country.

Zhang Xiaoshan, the legislator and professor, stressed that creating a favorable environment is key for encouraging migrant laborers to return home to work as professional farmers.

"We must extend subsidies to them for growing grains, and offer them technical support and professional training. We must improve social management and the rural financial system to ensure they earn more from farming than working in towns as migrant workers. In this way, they will be at ease about settling down in rural areas," he says.