Rural Education Plan in China

Large scale and intensive farming is encouraged in China for greatly improving farming efficiency. Agricultural production has become more and more depend on technology and mechanization. Therefore, a number of professional and well educated modern farmers are needed urgently in the country.
At present, in many regions of China, most of the farmers are elders and women, and over 50% of them only have five years or less education. In another hand, over 60% of the rural young labors have never done farming work and they are likely not work in farm in future. Therefore, how to fix the gap between low quality farmers and great demand of food and agricultural products for over 1.3 billion people has become a critical issue in the country.
To solve the problem, the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Education has carried on a number of educational programs for farmers’education, such as “Training and education program for professional farmers and farm managers”and professional “Training Plan”since 2011. The “Training Plan”aimed to training 100 million young (under 40 years old) professional farmers and each of the farmers will take training course 2720 hrs within 2-6 years. These education and training programs would greatly improve the rural education level in future.