June 15, 2010

Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province has leased 426,667 hectares of land in Russia to grow crops, the provincial agriculture commission said recently.

As China's northernmost province, Heilongjiang shares a 3,038-kilometer-long border with Russia.

The province has cooperated with Russia in agriculture, including farming, breeding and agricultural-products processing, the commission's statement said.

Mudanjiang, a border city in southern Heilongjiang, alone has 146,667 hectares of cropland in Russia, a 42% increase compared with the same time last year. The city also has 16 feed mills and two lipid-processing plants in Russia.

Heilongjiang is the largest commodity-grain production base in China. Its grain output totaled 43.5 billion kilogrammes last year.