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According to Liu, between 1959 and 1963, 60,000 young people from Shandong Province came to Beidahuang to reclaim the land. They are the second generation of exploiters. Since 1968, the government had called upon urban secondary school graduates to work in the countryside. By 1972, over 500,000 youths had come to develop Beidahuang from large cities such as Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. They are the third generation of exploiters.
By the time these young people came the living conditions had improved. They lived in houses built with lumber and clay.
"To those youths from cities, production was the largest challenge," Liu said.
A wood plow measuring 3 meters long and 1.5 meters tall is displayed in Liu's museum. According to her, such plows had been used for quite a long period during the Beidahuang reclamation. "On many farms there was no modern agricultural equipment and the number of livestock for plowing was minimal. Men were the main power for plowing and sowing. Three or four pulled the plow ahead and one would control the direction from behind the plow," she added.
In 1954, with the help of experts from the Soviet Union, a mechanized farm was established and named "Friendship Farm." After the relationship between Beijing and Moscow became strained in 1956, Soviet experts left and the mechanization of the farm became stagnant. Wood plows continued to be used on other farms.
During reclamation, more than 12,000 people sacrificed their lives. Some of them died of illness caused by exhaustion, some drowned in the swamps, and some gave their lives in dealing with emergencies or providing disaster relief. The HLRCB carved the names of these people on a wall of the museum for visitors to commemorate.
"These lives changed this wasteland into fertile land," Liu said.
At present, the cultivated land covers an area of 2.33 million hectares and almost all the wasteland that could be cultivated has been reclaimed.
Major grain base
Beidahuang has become China's most important commodity grain base and strategic grain reserve. The region currently accounts for nearly a quarter of the country's total non-original grain supplies. In 2006, its grain production capacity and commodity grain output reached 11.32 billion kg and 10 billion kg, respectively.
"The 10 billion kg of grain can feed the 70-million population in the four municipalities directly under the Central Government (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing) and in the army for a whole year," said Zhang Yawen, an official from the HLRCB.
The major crops are rice, soybean, wheat and corn. All the grain it produces is green and pollution-free. It is the largest producer of non-genetically modified soybeans in China.
According to Zhang, the HLRCB has established a comprehensive agricultural produce certification system for pollution-free, green and organic food. At present, Beidahuang has four state-level food quality inspection centers, three agricultural produce certification agencies and over 100 institutions engaged in research of green food. An efficient management system and a high-caliber contingent of management personnel for quality and safety of green food have been established.
By the end of 2006, 70 farms and 57 enterprises in the region had been engaged in the production of green, organic and pollution-free food. Moreover, 28 national-level raw material production bases for green food had been established; 470,000 hectares of land for green food production had been put under a unified supervision network; and 220 varieties of green food, 50 varieties of organic food, 692 production bases of pollution-free food and 166 varieties of pollution-free food had been certified. In 2006 alone, the output of green food of the region totaled 1.06 billion kg. Beidahuang has become the country's largest production and processing base of green food.
The Heilongjiang reclamation area also established a quality tracing system for agricultural produce from the field to the dining table, connected to market access. There have been nine pilot farms there for the quality tracing system of pollution-free agricultural produce set up by the Ministry of Agriculture. In 2006, Heilongjiang's quality and safety tracing and warning system of agricultural produce was developed for trial operation in four farms and information related to quality tracing during the production process was sent via regional information networks. At any time and anywhere, consumers can clearly see the details of pollution-free food when they are buying it in stores. If there are problems of product quality, they can be traced to the specific growers and fields that produced the products.
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