NE China city boosts fresh corn industry with advanced machinery, techniques

HARBIN, Oct. 5 (Xinhua) -- The city of Suihua, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, is seeing a bumper harvest on over 1 million mu (about 66,667 hectares) of fresh corn.

"We can harvest about 3,000 ears of fresh corn per mu, and the yield of high quality fresh corn is around 2,600 ears per mu, 400 ears more than last year," said Li Xuebin, director of the Haitao farmers' cooperative in Wangkui County.

"Fresh corn nets a profit that is four to five times that of conventional corn," Li said, adding that the cooperative expects a profit of 12 million yuan (about 1.69 million U.S. dollars) from its 6,000 mu of plantation this year.

Corn, a traditional staple food in China, has come in new varieties with greater sweetness and higher water content. Farmers in Suihua started to grow fresh corn two decades ago. Now Suihua has become a brand name for fresh corn, thanks to the advances in machinery and techniques.

In Changfeng Village, in the city of Hailun under Suihua, large harvesting machines are gathering the fresh corn from the fields. Each of the machines can harvest 100 mu of fresh corn per day, equivalent to the manual labor of 100 farmers.

Once collected, the corn is quickly loaded onto trucks and sent to be processed. "The harvested corn must arrive in our processing workshops 30 minutes after being harvested, or it will lose its tender texture and flavor," said Zhang Tinghui, general manager of Heilongjiang Yuanye Food Co., Ltd.

In the workshops, the corn ears are boiled for 15 to 20 minutes, cooled down and frozen, and then vacuum-packed before being prepared for delivery. "The whole process takes about three hours, which ensures that the corn on your table tastes like it was freshly picked," Zhang said.

In Zhenghuangyi Village, Beilin District, the Tianyuan vegetable processing and planting cooperative strictly controls the growth cycle and the harvest time to ensure that each batch of fresh corn is similar in size and taste.

"We expect to produce 11.2 million ears of fresh corn this year, and the corn stalks will also be purchased for silage by nearby farms," said Guan Lichen, head of the cooperative.

This year, the total production of fresh corn in Suihua is expected to hit 1.1 million tonnes, yielding a value of about 3.4 billion yuan, according to Guo Hongxiang, deputy director of the agricultural and rural affairs bureau of Suihua.

The plantation area of fresh corn in Suihua currently accounts for over 50 percent of the province's total.

In 2019, Suihua issued its fresh corn standard, with strict requirements for soil organic-matter content, corn varieties and field management. ■