Heilongjiang Achieves 99.28% Comprehensive Mechanization in Crop Cultivation, Ranking First Nationwide

On December 13, the Publicity Department of the CPC Heilongjiang Provincial Committee and the Heilongjiang Provincial Government News Office held the 17th session of the themed press conference series “High-Quality Completion of the 14th Five-Year Plan,” focusing on Heilongjiang’s efforts to vigorously promote agricultural revitalization and build livable, business-friendly, and beautiful rural areas.

At the press conference, regarding Heilongjiang’s progress in promoting agricultural mechanization, officials stated that agricultural machinery is a critical support for ensuring national food security and building a strong agricultural nation. Since the “14th Five-Year Plan,” Heilongjiang has focused on strengthening equipment, optimizing structure, raising standards, and promoting technology. Advanced agricultural machinery has played a vital role in supporting the development of modern large-scale agriculture and enhancing overall grain production capacity. The achievements can be summarized in three main aspects:

First, the equipment structure has been continuously optimized. By focusing on both renewal and retirement of machinery, Heilongjiang was the first in the country to implement a new round of agricultural machinery purchase subsidies and retirement replacement policies. Since the “14th Five-Year Plan,” the province has subsidized the purchase of over 700,000 units of various agricultural machinery and retired over 100,000 outdated machines. Heilongjiang was the first in the country to implement the “Better Machines, Better Subsidies” initiative, covering the full process of “plowing, planting, managing, and harvesting,” with tiered subsidies for four categories of equipment including power-shift tractors, pneumatic seeders, and plant protection drones. Currently, the province has 33,000 agricultural drones—the highest in China—49,000 tractors of 200 horsepower or above, and 21,000 pneumatic seeders, ranking among the top nationwide. With optimized machinery, greater horsepower, and higher efficiency, the province’s comprehensive mechanization rate for crop cultivation has risen to 99.28%, 24 percentage points above the national average, maintaining the top position in the country.

Second, production levels have significantly improved. By pairing advanced machinery with advanced practices, high-performance, high-horsepower equipment has enabled large ridge dense planting, conservation tillage, straw returning, and deep loosening techniques, becoming key drivers of increased grain yields. The use of high-performance seeders has raised seedling survival rates from about 89% to over 95%. The province now has 660,000 seeders with a maximum daily sowing capacity exceeding 16 million mu, and 210,000 large harvesting machines with a maximum daily harvesting capacity of over 20 million mu, fully meeting the mechanized spring sowing and autumn harvesting needs. Under normal weather conditions, most areas in the province can complete spring planting or autumn harvesting in about 10 days. Modern agricultural machinery has become the most reliable guarantee for timely farming, higher yields, and bountiful harvests.

Third, digital intelligence empowers iterative upgrades. Guided by smart agriculture development and leveraging the establishment of national-level agricultural machinery promotion and application pilot zones, Heilongjiang has built 26 maturation and demonstration bases, leading the nationwide promotion of large, high-horsepower, intelligent machinery. Driverless tractors, rice transplanters, and harvesters are now operating across the black soils of Heilongjiang. The province has also established the first provincial-level smart agricultural machinery dispatch platform, equipped with 130,000 intelligent monitoring terminals to enable smart supervision of key operations such as no-till sowing, deep loosening, and straw returning. Focusing on the Beidahuang Agricultural Reclamation Group and modern large-scale agriculture scenarios, the province has built 20 unmanned farms, leading the country in intelligent machinery applications and smart farm development, driving modern agriculture toward precision, digitalization, and intelligence.