I wrote a few days ago about simple ways technology can greatly improve farmers' everyday lives. The China Daily article I had read mentioned a couple national Agriculture Bureau sites, but I wanted to take a look at the more local sites that farmers in my local area would be able to take advantage of.
I wanted to get a quick look at Liuzhou's Agriculture Bureau website, but it was something like the one afternoon I had many moons ago to take a quick look at the Lourve Museum. There is nothing quick about it. It has loads of information, so I decided to find what I could about the area tea business.
Like so many Chinese websites, upon first glance, all I see is millions of characters. Chinese websites are overwhelming not so much because of the characters, but just massive amounts of information. I guess this is just a matter of preference, it is the Yahoo homepage versus the Google homepage issue. But I digress.
A little note of warning. I think just about every link in this article, except the one to my own article at the beginning, and the Google and Yahoo links, will be to Chinese language websites. So, if you are interested, take a look. Just do not waste your time looking for English. These are sites aimed at Chinese nationals.
I took a look in the Agriculture Technology section and immediately found numerous articles about the tea industry: building a new tea plantation in northern Guangxi, new technology for quick growth of sapling tea bushes, non-harmful tea bush management and fertilization, and several about tea production machinery. For local tea farmers, this is not only helpful information, but is specific to this area.
So, not really wanting to delve too deep in the tea business on my first visit to Liuzhou's Ag site, I went back to the home page and visited the Agriculture General Situation page, which has a clickable map for the Liuzhou area and specific information for each county. Information on each county's resources, industries, and agricultural products can be easily found for investors...that is, Chinese speaking ones. Again, no English here. Nice clickable map, though.
And one of my personal favorites of the site, one that would be very useful for farmers who are trying to sell for the best price possible, the price lists of products in the Liuzhou markets. There you will find the prices for meats, eggs, vegetables, fruit, oils, and just about everything you can think of in the local markets. They even give a little comparitive context by stating the prices in bustling markets, average markets, and city fringe markets.
That is exactly the kind of information many farmers could use to sell for the right price. A simple look at the price pages would let them know if the cheap price the buyer is quoting is real, and also if they have an opportunity to charge more for their vegetables and earn a better profit.
Now, the question is how to really get this information into the hands of those who need it most.
