China Be World's Largest Irrigation Country - Arable Land Irrigation Rate 51%

It was learned from the first National Smart Irrigation Forum and National Irrigation Agriculture Green Development Alliance Meeting held on the 5th that China's effective irrigation area has grown from 240 million mu in 1949 to 1.037 billion mu in 2021, accounting for only about 50% of the country's arable land. 75% of the country's total grain and more than 90% of economic crops are produced on the irrigated area. At present, the irrigation rate of arable land in China is as high as 51%, which is 2.68 times of the world average. China has become the world's largest irrigation country, and the development of irrigation technology has made important contributions to ensuring national food security.

At the meeting, Wu Hongwei, deputy director of the Farmland Construction Management Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, introduced that by the end of this year, 1 billion mu of high-standard farmland will be built across the country, and the area of high-efficiency water-saving irrigation will exceed 400 million mu. The method of farmland irrigation will be further transformed to intensive and economical. The actual water consumption per mu for irrigation in China has dropped from 492 cubic meters in 1997 to 355 cubic meters in 2021, and the effective utilization coefficient of farmland irrigation water has reached 0.568. The practice has proved that the development of high-efficiency water-saving irrigation is an important measure to speed up the modernization of agriculture and rural areas. Therefore, it is necessary to accelerate the promotion of high-efficiency water-saving irrigation in an all-around way from the three aspects of "engineering, agronomy, and varieties", and further stimulate the driving force for the innovative development of high-efficiency water-saving irrigation.

At the meeting, the Agricultural Water Strategy Research Center of the Institute of Farmland Irrigation, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences was unveiled and released the first "Smart Irrigation Hotspot Frontier Report (2022)". Zhou Guomin, director of the Institute of Farmland Irrigation, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said that smart irrigation is a new application A generation of information technology empowers irrigation projects, based on data knowledge, model algorithms as the core, equipment products and system platforms as the carrier, through the digitalization, networking and intelligence of the whole process of irrigation, to achieve water saving, high efficiency, high yield and high quality. Synergy. Smart irrigation will develop towards "digitalization of information perception, precise variable operations, intelligent decision support, and scenario-based application services". It will continue to build a nationwide network of agricultural water efficiency, realize intelligent management of the entire irrigation process, and vigorously promote the development of smart irrigation technology. The integration of government, production, education, research and application, and technology supports the development of modern agriculture in China.

The conference was hosted by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the National Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Alliance, and hosted by the Institute of Farmland Irrigation of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the National Irrigated Agriculture Green Development Alliance.