October 21, 2011

Heilongjiang province, one of China's major crops bases and granaries, has completed the autumn grain harvest and expects output to be 57.5 million tonnes, up for the eighth consecutive year.

The increase in grain output may be attributed to increased farming mechanisation, the Heilongjiang Agricultural Department said.

From the beginning of this year's harvest, Heilongjiang has deployed more than 4,000 combine harvesters from large-scale modern agricultural corps and provided farm machinery to large family farms to relieve reaping machine shortages.

This year, the area harvested by machine reached 9.668 million hectares in the province, accounting for 70.2% of the whole harvest area, up 7.2 percentage points over last year.