Technology raises farm productivity

To make things worse, more and more farmers are leaving their land for the cities, causing labor shortages in rural areas. In 2012, China had 262.61 million migrant workers, according to the bureau.

"The most important thing is to train farmers who are capable of making money from agriculture," Zhang said.

Between 2009 and 2012, the ministry sent 240,800 science and technology specialists to rural regions.

Zhang Shengming, 48, was one.

In 2007, Zhang contracted 13.3 hectares of land in Ningxia for wolfberry plating.

He found that pesticide and fertilizer abuse was common.

Zhang established a group of farmers who set strict restrictions on the use of pesticide and fertilizers. It soon attracted 537 households.

By 2012, the number of households planting wolfberries in the town had increased from 80 (in 2007) to 1,050, producing a yearly income of 6,350 yuan per person.

The specialists, distributed in 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, set up 8,401 agriculture-related businesses by the end of 2011, covering 57.56 million people in rural areas.

They managed to achieve 2.68 billion yuan in profit, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Zhang also launched projects to build agricultural science and technology parks nationwide.

Since 2001, 73 agricultural science and technology parks have been built, and these help train farmers in the most modern and productive methods of farming.

"The parks are like the headquarters of our agriculture industry - they combine each link on the industrial chain, from R&D to products, and cultivate more agricultural talent for us," Zhang said.

The National Agricultural Science and Technology Zone of the Yellow River Delta (Bin Zhou), located in Shandong province, is an example for the integration of technology and agriculture.

In April, four digital "jackstraws" were installed on an experimental plot in the zone. The "jackstraw", a robot based on the Internet of Things technology, inspects the status of crops and sends the information back to the user's cellphone.

"This means you can sit in your couch and farm the field via your cellphone," Zhang said.