E-commerce firms set foot on land circulation

HEFEI - For the past 50 years, Hu Shaobai has been toiling on a piece of farmland, planting rice and rapeseed. "Finally I can get a rest," he said, as he has recently transferred the land to an e-commerce company.

Zhejiang Xinghe E-Commerce Co Ltd, an enterprise directly under Zhejiang Supply and Marketing Cooperative, in a joint effort with e-commerce giant Alibaba and the farmers' cooperative in Jixi county of Anhui province, has launched China's first online personal customized farm project, also called Gengdibao, in March.

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Customers participating the project can subscribe the right to use the land via the online platform and get the land output. The land is circulated from farmers to Xinghe company, which further entrusted the management of land to the local farmers' cooperative.

Seventy-year-old Hu Shaobai is a villager in Longchuan village under Jixi. About 30 percent of the village's 1,300 mu (87 hectares) of farmland is left unattended.

"The young people have gone to work in the cities. Farmers as old as me mostly do not have enough energy to continue working in the fields. It has been a pity to have so much land wasted." Hu said.

Since the program was launched, 3,560 customers from around the country have subscribed more than 430 mu of land, and the sales volume exceeded 2 million yuan ($320,000), said Dong Jiancheng, manager of the local cooperative.

Nearly 300 farming households in Jixi have signed land circulation contracts with Xinghe company. The farmers can get an annual circulation payment of 800 yuan per mu (one hectare equals 15 mu).

The local cooperative hires farmers to work in the subscribed land, and those farmers get a monthly wage of about 2,500 yuan, while in Jixi County, the average monthly wage of the farmers is less than 800 yuan in 2013.