The coordinates are located in the central part of Gansu. My aunt's eldest cousin is in his fifties, my nephew is three or four years old, and my son is in his twenties, and he has reached marriageable age, so the cousins are under a lot of pressure. The main source of the cousin's family's income is the cousin's family farming and the cousin's part-time job. My cousin expropriated more than 30 acres of land, and no one in the village cultivated it. After my cousin helped him farm, he went to the surrounding provinces, and I went out to work, and then came back to help my cousin and sister-in-law work together, and when it was time to harvest, I could go out to work for three or four months. year. This year, the weather is dry, so we rely on the dry weather. As a result, the total price of more than 30 acres of land was only more than 10,000 yuan. After deducting the cost of machinery and fertilizer, we barely made any money. Last year was better, with a relatively small potato production. Well, excluding costs, the income is twenty thousand yuan. Today's agriculture is basically done by machinery. Except for my cousin, who needs to do the planting and harvesting process, I usually rely on my cousin to do it herself, and she is also quite busy. My cousin said she often had free time to visit her home. In addition to the agricultural income, the cousin's family also raised three or four cows, combined agriculture and animal husbandry, fed them with the grain and fodder grown at home, and earned money by selling calves every year, about 20,000 to 30,000 yuan. Annually. In addition, my cousin's income for three months of training is about 10,000 to 20,000 yuan, and if the annual income is good, it is not bad to have an income of 50,000 to 60,000 yuan a year.
The problem now is that my cousin is getting older, in his 50s, and it is not easy to find a job. Because my cousin is looking for a job that is temporary, I look for it once a year, and sometimes I can't find it, so I stay at home. This is also why my cousin wants to usurp other people's land. Fortunately, the ground below is close to the sky, and there is no land rent. As long as the climate is good, the annual income is relatively stable, and coupled with the breeding of animal husbandry, the income is also relatively secure. As my cousin gets older, it becomes more and more difficult to go out to work, he has no skills, so he can only sell his physical strength to make money, but the older he gets, the more difficult it is to sell his physical strength. He needed to find a more stable job. The work is getting harder and harder, and I have to do odd jobs everywhere. As a result, job opportunities are not very stable, and you will be forced to retire slowly. Job market. If one day his cousin can't find a job, what can he and his cousin do besides farming? Fortunately, the land in my hometown is not very valuable, and I can harvest and plant. Expand the area, combine planting and breeding, I can still do it. Since the son is not yet married, the cousin is still under great family pressure: even if the son is married and has the ability to work, he still needs various lands to support him. The land will be of great help to him and his family, and the cousin is still very important.
There is now a notion that "no one is farming", and the elderly are mainly rural people. As the elderly slowly withdraw from agricultural production, and the younger ones are reluctant to enter, there will be no more people. The situation of the peasants. Behind this vision is the assumption that young people should replace older people in agriculture, which has been the norm in rural areas for thousands of years, but it is also true that young people are reluctant to work in agriculture, then there will be a "raceless" and "land" crisis. But this assumption is not correct. In fact, the agricultural inheritance model has changed for some time. Young people are no longer involved in agriculture, but young people in their 50s and 60s are still involved in agriculture. Agriculture is aging. But there will be no human crisis in the agricultural sector. So instead of asking young people if they are willing to cultivate, we should ask them if they are willing to cultivate when they are old. I think there will still be a lot of people who will say yes. Why are young people willing to farm when they are older? The reason is that it is difficult to find a job after the age of 50, the pension is very poor after the age of 60, and land is their most reliable and stable income**. Therefore, the key to judging whether farmers will quit the land is to look at the options of the 1950s and 1960s, as long as these people do not have stable market employment opportunities and relatively adequate retirement security, they still need to work. Land is their last resort.
According to the "2022 Migrant Worker Monitoring Survey Report" released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the proportion of elderly migrant workers over 50 years old accounted for 292%, an increase of 19 percentage points from the previous year. According to the data, from 2008 to 2022, the average age of migrant workers rose from 34 to 423 years old, and the proportion of elderly migrant workers aged 50 and above increased from 114% to 292%, reaching 863.21 million. It can be seen that elderly migrant workers are a very large and growing group, this group has a low level of education, lacks professional skills, and it is more and more difficult to find a job as they get older. It is for this reason that the file n. In 2023 and 2024, it will be proposed to provide employment support for elderly migrant workers for two consecutive years1. From ** to ** local **, different regions have also taken some support measures, such as "disaster relief", vocational training, introduction of employment opportunities, etc. However, due to age restrictions, employment opportunities for this part of the population will inevitably become more and more limited, and eventually they will have to slowly withdraw from the migrant worker market. At this time, the land represents a kind of escape for this group of people. As long as the conditions for agricultural production are convenient and moderately expanded, expanding the scope of business from small peasants to middle peasants is a feasible way to expand income.
In addition to limited employment opportunities, farming can also provide a steady escape route. Smallholder farmers also have irreplaceable advantages over large-scale operations. Let me tell you about my personal experience. There was a time when I really wanted to eat grapefruit. As a result, I bought several yuzu at different fruit stores, but none of them were delicious. One of the problems I encountered at that time was how difficult it was to eat a delicious pomelo in a big city like Beijing. Later, I asked a friend to send me some from his hometown, and the yuzu he sent me was particularly delicious. At first, I thought it was a problem with the origin, but I didn't expect that the yuzu I bought from the vegetable store was also made from the region. Later, a friend told me that they had grown this pomelo themselves, and after eating only a few of them, I discovered this pomelo and the taste was typical of small-scale production. Once the scale is expanded, the production and operation model will be more capitalized, and in order to reduce costs, the production efficiency will be improved through the extensive use of fertilizers, pesticides and other technologies, which will inevitably reduce the quality of agricultural products. But smallholder farmers have a small scale of production and a limited workforce. Wealthier and more attentive to things, production methods can be more environmentally friendly, resulting in higher quality produce. It can be seen that the problem is not that smallholder farmers cannot produce high-quality agricultural products, but that the problem is how to sell these agricultural products to those who really need them and sell them at a good price. The market has economies of scale: these high-quality, small-scale agricultural products are difficult to convey to consumers through the existing market system, and their market value has not been fully exploited. In conclusion, small-scale production has irreplaceable advantages over large-scale production. The so-called green agricultural products are largely determined by the scale of production. Smallholder farmers have an advantage in green agriculture. How to improve green agriculture and increase the value of agricultural products in the context of agricultural product consumption is an important issue.
From the above analysis, it can be seen that, on the one hand, small farmers are still a retreat for many peasant families, and elderly migrant workers will continue to retreat to agriculture; On the other hand, the potential for small-scale agriculture has not diminished. Fully developed and released, nothing to do with it. Effective market docking still needs to be explored. Three rural work migrant workers