A press briefing hold by the Hunan Provincial Bureau of Statistics recently revealed that Hunan had saw a total intended planting area of 71.59 million mu (about 4.78 million hectares) in the first quarter of 2022, outnumbering the target area by 240 thousand mu (about 16 thousand hectares).

In the first quarter, Hunan has taken various measures to keep its planting area stable, including increasing grain production subsidies. Competent agricultural departments have reserved agricultural materials such as seeds, pesticides, chemical fertilizers and agricultural films in advance for spring farming and ploughing.

The agricultural material supply system has been improved to dispatch chemical fertilizers to the first line of spring farming and ploughing.

Financial departments have allocated 150 million yuan for agricultural machinery subsidies, an increase of 40 million yuan over the same period last year, ensuring that 600 thousand sets of agricultural machinery and tools and 14 thousand skilled agricultural machinery personnel are available for spring ploughing this year.

At present, Hunan boasts an intended early rice planting area of 18.152 million mu (about 1.21 million hectares) and an intended soybean planting area of 2.05 million mu (about 136.67 thousand hectares), exceeding the target area by 152 thousand mu (about 10.13 thousand hectares) and 83 thousand mu (about 5.53 thousand hectares) respectively.

The animal husbandry production in Hunan has also shown great performance. In the first quarter, Hunan had 18.94 million hogs, 416 thousand cows, 2.772 million sheep and 154 million fowls slaughtered, which increased by 23.8 percent, 1.7 percent, 0.2 percent and 4.3 percent year on year.