Xinjiang in northwest China is entering the season to harvest its major cash crops, as sugar beets, chilly peppers, sea buckthorn and other crops are ripening in succession.
In a village of Jiashi County in the Uygur autonomous region, local farmers are using large harvesting machinery to reap sugar beets.
The county's rich resources of water, land, sunlight and heat resources plus steep temperature differences between day and night make it an ideal place to grow sugar beets.
Local authorities have promoted large-scale plantation and scientific field management to continuously improve the output. They have also built a processing industrial park, forming a more complete industrial chain and creating more job opportunities for farmers.
"We have built a circular industry chain of sugar production which has offered jobs to more than 10,000 people, and increased their income by more than 3,000 yuan (about 420 U.S. dollars) each on average," said Wang Fuli, director of the farm produce marketing service center of Jiashi County.
The more than 4,000 hectares of chilies grown in Wensu County of Xinjiang's Aksu Prefecture are also set to have a bumper harvest. Large piles of red hot peppers being dried on ground have attracted buyers from Sichuan, Shaanxi and Shandong provinces, far away from Xinjiang.
"The chili peppers here have a good color value, with desirable degree of dryness and quality. And there are hydraulic packers just on the sunning ground, which facilitates truck transportation," said Zhao Wenbing, a purchaser.
In Yanchi Town of Yiwu County, stretches of sea buckthorn woods are full of orange fruits, signaling another bumper harvest.
The town has cultivated 1,600 hectares of sea buckthorns, and one sixth of them have borne fruits. With forestry and fruit plantation and processing companies introduced here, the region has formed an integrated development mode covering seedling, planting, field management, harvesting, product research and development, processing and marketing, increasing incomes for more than 2,000 households of farmers and herdsmen every year.
Xinjiang enters season of harvesting cash crops
Xinjiang enters season of harvesting cash crops
