Smoke from wildfires shrouding over many parts of Mato Grosso, the most severely impacted state by wildfires in Brazil, has caused discomfort among local residents as it persists due to prolonged heatwave.
According to statistics from the National Institute for Space Research, as of Friday, Brazil had recorded over 180,000 wildfires in 2024, with nearly 40,000 of them occurring in Mato Grosso state, ranking it first among all the states in Brazil.
Residents of Cuiaba, the capital of Mato Grosso, said while high temperatures and dry weather were typical in the city in previous years, the prolonged heatwave coupled with smoke this year is highly unusual.
"The smoke is worsening. The situation has been very dire over the past two months. We have not had rain for over 100 days. Low humidity, below 10 percent, is a huge problem, necessitating extensive use of humidifiers for us," said Guilherme Rodrigues Mendes, a resident.
"The weather is quite bad. I feel terrible. I have been sick at least three times. My throat is extremely dry, leading to coughing and feeling nauseous," said Navai, another resident.
According to the local fire department, 1,000 firefighters are battling fires across multiple locations in Mato Grosso. The state encompasses three vital biomes -- the Amazon rainforest, the Cerrado savannah, and the Pantanal wetlands. Currently, the fires in the Pantanal wetlands are largely contained, yet numerous active fire points persist in the Amazon rainforest and Cerrado savannah.
Wildfire smoke in Brazil's Mato Grosso state causes discomfort among locals
With the beginning of the cotton harvest season, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is anticipating higher yields from advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization.
Xinjiang is the largest production area of high-quality commodity cotton in China. The 2.47-million-hectare cotton growing area in the region has produced more than 5 million tons of cotton for six consecutive years.
The northern and southern parts of the vast autonomous region have different climates, different cotton varieties and also different growing periods. Currently, cotton picking started two weeks ago in northern Xinjiang, while the harvesting has just begun in the southern areas.
In Tumxuk City, located in southern Xinjiang, cotton farmers are using all-in-one harvesters to help them pick cotton, separate the flowers from the stalks and pack them into bundles.
"In the past, we picked the cotton manually. It took us more than a month to pick 100 mu (6.67 hectares) of cotton, and the cost reached 1,000 yuan per mu (about 2,106 U.S. dollars per hectare). Now, we use domestically produced cotton pickers to gather them, which have high efficiency and low cost. It now takes less than a day to harvest my 100 mu of cotton, with a cost less than 200 yuan per mu," said Turaxun Samat, a local farmer.
This year, Xinjiang has vigorously promoted the new cotton planting technology of drip irrigation under the mulching film at the appropriate emergence temperature, replacing the old method of irrigating before sowing. The technology can greatly improve the emergence rate while also saving water resources.
In addition, the precision sowing supported by BeiDou Navigation Satellite System and remote sensing monitoring by the agricultural big data platform have also been widely adopted across Xinjiang, contributing to the growth of cotton output.
"This year, a total of 1,057,800 mu (about 70,520 hectares) of cotton have been planted in Tumxuk City, and the unginned cotton yield is estimated at 451.4 kilograms per mu, an average increase of 11.7 kilograms per mu over the previous year," said Chen Yongsen, a member of the leadership of the city's Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
The cotton harvesting in Xinjiang is expected to end in early November.
Xinjiang enters cotton harvest season with higher yield expected
