What changed
China’s agricultural-services sector is being pushed from one-off farm tasks toward full-process support covering cultivation, planting, management and harvesting. At the Sixth National Agricultural Comprehensive Service Provider Conference, officials set “15th Five-Year Plan” targets including:
- 100 stronger service providers
- 1,000 new or upgraded service centers
- 50 million tonnes of daily drying capacity
- Services reaching 10 million smallholder households
- 300 million mu-service instances across ploughing, planting, pest control and harvesting
The All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives says its system already includes 16,700 service providers, 15,000 production service centers and 60,000 crop hospitals, reaching more than 5.677 million smallholder households.
Why it matters
This is a shift in what a farm service business is expected to be. Instead of selling fertilizer, machinery or a single operation separately, providers are being asked to assemble a complete production package for each crop, from greener inputs and efficient technology to intelligent equipment and digital management.
That could make small farms less dependent on coordinating every stage themselves. It also gives the supply and marketing cooperatives a larger role as the connective tissue between service companies, local centers and farmers.
The ambition is substantial: the proposed household coverage would extend well beyond the system’s current reach, while the drying target points to a major expansion of post-harvest capacity. Officials also called for targeted financing to ease funding problems for agricultural operators, but the announcement does not specify how the targets will be financed, allocated regionally or measured.
The practical test will be whether these services arrive as dependable, crop-specific systems rather than a longer catalogue of products.
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