THE total income by the agricultural machinery industry was expected to reach 3 billion yuan this year in Qingdao.

More than 80 percent of the city’s fields are maintained by agricultural equipment. There are nearly 5,000 corn harvesters and 82 percent of the corn crop was harvested by machines, an increase of 5 percent over last year. Mechanical harvesters brought in 62 percent of the peanut crop and 45 percent of tuber crops were harvested by machines, an increase of 7 percent and 5 percent over last year. There were now 439,000 equipment operators in the city. More than 8,600 were members of the city’s 261 agricultural machinery cooperative organizations. These organizations had more than 50,000 machines with a total cost of 550 million yuan. The operators provide on-farm services to farmers and also participate in village field construction.

 (Wang Yuanyuan, Liu Lina, Ren Hongzhen)