China still has a system of massive state farms, mostly in desolate border regions like Heilongjiang, Xinjiang, and Yunnan, and on the outskirts of cities. In Chinese, they are known as "reclamation" farms (nong ken) since many are established in desolate areas or on reclaimed marsh, jungle or mountain land. These are holdovers from the central planning period that have now morphed into big agribusiness enterprises. Since they have large scale and access to government resources, they are on the vanguard of many trends. The state farm system held a conference in Beijing this week to publicize its traceability system that involves 50 state farm enterprises and 6 local enterprises in 23 provinces. According to Farmer's Daily , it is an early implementation of the objective of bringing into play a “record-keeping in production, product-tracing in distribution, information retrievability, accountability” system. During November 7-14, the Ministry of Agriculture’s state farm bu...
Retired USDA economist Fred Gale peers through the "dim sums" of puzzling data to provide insight about China's agricultural markets in bite-size pieces like Chinese "dim sum" snacks. See the Archive and Labels for posts on various topics going back to 2008.