Making it a family affair on the land

"About 90 percent of rural residents had non-agricultural jobs in Songjiang in 2007. Only 6.6 percent — 12,500 people — were directly engaged in farming," said the Songjiang Agriculture Commission.

Under a pilot scheme approved by the district authority, farmers in Songjiang district, which is traditionally a major granary for Shanghai, started to experiment with the family farm concept in 2007.

Under the scheme, a qualified rural family could sign a contract with the village authority and rent the management rights to a large patch of arable land from other families for more than three years.

"Specifically, a family farm is owned and operated by one family. It should also refer to one that is quite big, ranging from about seven to 10 hectares, and use family members as the major manpower," said Xu Aifang, deputy director of the Agriculture Office of Yexie county, Songjiang district.

Currently, 80 percent of the approximate 9,100 hectares of arable land in Songjiang district is operated by about 2,000 family farms.

Issued in January 2013, China's first policy document for the year, known as the No 1 central government document, which is always considered as a weather vane for the annual agriculture policy, for the first time mentioned the term "family farm".

The government will create policies to speed up rural land transfers and grant more subsidies to large-scale landholders, family farms and rural cooperatives to encourage the establishment of large-scale and specialized farming, the document said.

There are more than 6,670 family farms operating in today's China, under 33 pilot land transfer projects approved by the Ministry of Agriculture, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

Jiang Yongqiu, 58, a skilled tractor driver and an experienced rice grower, said he earned more than 80,000 yuan by planting rice on his family farm last year, a sum he "dared not imagine before".

Jiang said most of his life he barely earned any money.

"I drove tractors for more than 30 years before running this farm. I remember for a very long time the pay was just two yuan a day. I had a small patch of land to grow some rice to feed the family. That was all of my income," he said.