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Irrigation app raising incomes for nation’s farmers
watering his crops used to be a time-consuming chore for Yu Changde and his family in their village in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. These days, it’s easy.
Living in Manas County, 110 kilometers northwest of regional capital Urumqi, 53-year-old Yu looks after about 7 hectares of land.
“A couple of years ago, my whole family had to participate in monitoring the irrigation process with spades to make sure the water went in the right way,” Yu said.
Thanks to modern high-efficiency irrigation programs using high-tech equipment, farmers in Manas now control irrigation via a mobile app.
In Xinjiang, modernization is not only making the lives of farmers easier, but raising their incomes and freeing more people from the land.
Yu said the new irrigation system enables accurate and automatic control of water, using less than traditional irrigation methods which flood the land.
The county’s water resource authority said water-saving irrigation technology has increased incomes by 4,500 yuan (US$683) per hectare.
Yang Wansen, vice general manager of Xinjiang Tianye Water Saving Irrigation System, said the company began researching the technology in 1999. Today, its water-saving irrigation products are sold in most provincial regions in China and 17 other countries, covering a total of 4.67 million hectares.
“Taking rice for instance, our products can reduce the water needed to about a third of the water needed in traditional irrigation,” Yang said.
The company’s technology was also used to restore land opposite Tibet’s Potala Palace that was formerly barren.
Its products can also be spotted in the vast cotton fields in Shihezi, the city where Tianye is based.
In 2016-2020, China aims to increase the area of high-efficiency water-saving irrigation by 6.67 million hectares to 24.6 million hectares, of which 15 percent of the new area will be in Xinjiang.
In Yu’s village, a small area of farmland is still not covered by the new irrigation method.
“I hope the new technology will continue to expand and cover all the farmland,” Yu said.
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