Machine harvest of wheat almost complete

China's large-scale machine harvest of wheat this year has almost completed, said the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

Since the harvest started on May 28 and proceeded from south to north, 20 million hectares of wheat have been harvested in nine provinces across the country, completing 99.2 percent of the total harvest, the ministry said in a news release on Tuesday.

More than 98 percent of the wheat was harvested by agricultural machinery with the involvement of more than 800,000 professional harvesters, it added.

Major wheat producing provinces such as Hubei and Henan finished the harvest days earlier than last year.

More than half of wheat was harvested in Shaanxi province within four days before the rain on June 12, with a record 197,000 hectares harvested in a single day.