Innovation drives agri-growth

More from grain

For rice processors in Jingshan, administered by Jingmen, another opportunity lies in making better use of what has already been harvested.

Inside Hubei Guobao Qiaomi Co's plant, rice moves through husking, milling, polishing, color sorting and packaging on automated lines, monitored from a central control room.

An intelligent milling system has increased the yield of whole milled rice by about 2 percentage points.

At an annual processing volume of 300,000 tons of paddy, that improvement could yield roughly 6,000 additional tons of premium rice, worth more than 10 million yuan.

Broken rice, bran and husks can become rice flour, rice oil, protein products, animal feed and biomass fuel, extending the uses of a harvest beyond bagged rice.

Through contract farming, the company provides growers with seeds, technical guidance and common production standards before purchasing their harvest.

"We are building a whole value chain from seed breeding and standardized cultivation to deeper processing, branding and rural tourism," said Zheng Yao, deputy Party secretary of Sunqiao town, a core Qiaomi growing area.

Smarter transport

In Zigui county, Yichang, a major challenge comes after the fruit has been picked. The county produces about 1 million tons of oranges a year, but many orchards are scattered across steep mountainsides.

In 2023, the county began promoting the use of drones for transporting navel oranges on a large scale.

"It used to take about 40 minutes to carry nearly 50 kilograms of oranges down the mountain along a two-kilometer route by hand," drone pilot Guo Xingcheng said.

But with agricultural drones, it only takes one minute to transport the navel oranges from the hilltop orchard to a roadside collection point, Guo said.

Now, he said, a drone can carry about 100 kg per trip and transport about 25,000 kg in a day, which makes the work five to six times more efficient than carrying the fruit by hand.

In 2025, drones transported more than 700,000 tons of navel oranges across the county, with operations covering about 300,000 mu of orchards, said Li Li, an official with Zigui's Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau.

The county now has 1,050 agricultural drones and more than 2,600 drone pilots, Li said.

New technology has eased the workload of farmers and greatly improved transport efficiency, he added.