Yichang cuts use of pesticides and fertilizers
In recent years, Yichang City has focused on green agriculture, exploring mechanisms to prevent and control agricultural pollution.
Drones hover above the rice fields in Gongjiaping Village, spraying pesticides to combat pests such as rice stem borers, rice leaf rollers , and rice planthoppers, and diseases such as sheath blight.
"The use of drones reduces water consumption and increases the efficiency of pesticide utilization by over 30 percent. And also helps protect the health of operators," said Zhang Jingbin, Deputy Director of the Agricultural Machinery Service Center in Zhijiang of Yichang City. "Plant protection drones have the advantages of speed, efficiency, and spraying in a uniform manner. Three drones can complete pest control for the 1,200 mu (80 hectares) of rice fields in a single day. "
Like Gongjiaping Village, other places in Yichang City are making efforts to protect fertile land, ensure food security, and promote green and ecological agriculture. Yichang reduced its consumption of pesticides from 8,395 tonnes in 2017 to 5,944 tonnes of pesticides in 2022, an almost 30 percent drop.
Yichang City has also made progress in promoting eco-friendly fertilizer practices. By implementing measures such as soil-specific fertilization, diversification of chemical fertilizers, and monitoring and evaluation of fertilizer efficiency, the city decreased its chemical fertilizer usage from 342,800 tons in 2017 to 276,200 tons in 2022. In 2022, the area of green manure cultivation in the city reached 523,200 mu, and the area where organic fertilizers replaced chemical fertilizers reached 1.586 million mu.
Green manure is a crop specifically cultivated to be incorporated into the soil while still green, while organic fertilizers are fertilizers that are naturally produced. Some organic fertilizers come from animal waste such as meat processing waste, manure, slurry, and guano; some are biosolids; others are plant-based fertilizers such as compost.
