With a loud roar, two large machines, one yellow and one green, slowly moved forward across the farmland in Hou'anling Village, Tanghekou Town, Huairou District. The yellow one is a multifunctional farm stone picker, and the green one is a bulldozer. As the stone picker passes, stones of all sizes are "picked" from the soil and accurately deposited onto the bulldozer following closely behind on a conveyor belt.
Large and numerous stones in mountainous farmlands significantly damage agricultural machinery during sowing, field management, and harvesting, rendering normal operations impossible. As a result, mechanization in mountainous areas has been constrained, explained Wang Tianhua, Director of the Agricultural Machinery Management Section at the Huairou District Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
Tangkou Town actively supports the development of agricultural machinery professional service organizations. It has introduced stone-picking machines from Huairou District to the fields. Through the on-site operation of large agricultural machinery such as stone-pickers and rotary tillers, barren land has been transformed into fertile land, capable of growing a variety of crops. This initiative has addressed the bottleneck issue of agricultural mechanization in the mountainous areas of Huairou District and filled a gap.
As spring planting season approaches, in the fields of Houshan village, Houkou Town, a series of large-scale agricultural machinery has become the main force in the spring farming production. "If we had used oxen for plowing, it would have taken at least five days to finish this land. But with mechanization, it can be done in half a day. It's not only faster, saving labor and money, but also the soil is plowed better and deeper, resulting in healthier and stronger crops," said Gao Han, a villager from Houshan, while observing the machinery at work.
Tanghekou Town, located in the deep mountainous area of Huairou's northern region, previously relied on a "manual + livestock" farming method that was not only inefficient but also time-consuming and labor-intensive. In the past two years, the town has fully utilized national policies supporting the development of agricultural mechanization. It has established the Beijing Tanghe Agricultural Machinery Cooperative, introducing over 10 large-scale agricultural machinery, including multi-functional field stone pickers, rotary tillers, mulch laying machines, and straw shredders, covering all stages of farming. This has propelled the process of agricultural mechanization.
For these agricultural machinery, the cooperative manages them uniformly and pairs them reasonably, concentrating on cultivated plots. Currently, over 90% of the collective land in Tangkoukou Town, totaling approximately 1800 acres, has achieved mechanized farming.
