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Stalks to Improve Environment in West China
Transportation of stalks- processed fodder from central and east China to western provinces will ease the desertification there, said experts from Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Science and Technology today.
Experts emphasized excessive stock rasing in west China has resulted in serious desertification, while limitation on stock raising will be a bad solution, which will reduce the herdsmen's income and living standards. Low-cost fodder will be a good resort.
Transport of stalk-made fodder from Tianjin, Hebei, and Beijing to the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region will not cost much, but it will realize a balance between the two areas in stalks supply and demand.
Meanwhile, local stalks can be used to fertilize the limited farmland there, increasing the crops yield and realizing sustained development of agriculture, they said.
According to their research work, 5,000 kg of stalks for per hectare will increase the crops yield by at least 370 kg, and three consecutive years of returning stalks to farmland will raise the organic materials proportion in the soil by about six percent. As the summer harvest approaches, China is reminding its farmers to heed the ban on crop stalks burning.
Government officials said that burning of large amounts of crop stalks not only pollutes the air, but also affects the normal operation of trains, buses and planes.
Burning of crop stalks would be banned this year especially on both sides of 13 expressways, including the Beijing-Shijiazhuang, Shanghai-Hangzhou and Xi'an-Baoji expressways, and of some sections of the Beijing-Guangzhou and Beijing-Shenyang railway lines.
Of the 600 million tons of crop stalks China produces every year, 100 million tons are turned into manure and returned to the farmland, 170 million tons are processed into fodder, and the rest are either burned or cast away.
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