Recent data from the National Bureau of Statistics show a bumper harvest for early-season rice in East China's Zhejiang province this year.

The province's total production of early-season rice stood at 628,000 metric tons this year, up 4.1 percent year-on-year; the province's total sown area for early-season rice was 1.518 million mu (1,012 square kilometers), up 2.4 percent from the previous year. Both the production volume and the sown area were the largest they have been in the past five years.

The bumper harvest, which occurred despite the negative impacts of the COVID-19 epidemic, late spring coldness, and pest problems, would not have been possible without the government's financial and technical support.

The provincial government offered a record high subsidy (120 yuan ($17.5) per mu) for above-scale rice farmers, and set the minimum purchasing price for early-season rice at 248 yuan per one hundred kilos, 2.5 percent higher than the national standard.

Many local governments in the province even offered extra subsidies. For instance, Qujiang district and Kecheng district in Quzhou subsidized early-season rice farmers with 60 yuan and 80 yuan respectively for each mu of plantation area. Wenling, a county-level city administered by Taizhou, offered 200 yuan per mu in subsidies for above-scale rice farmers.

In addition, Zhejiang authorities provided more advanced agricultural technologies to the province's rice growers, which has significantly boosted rice production amidst late spring coldness.

Despite the economic slowdown caused by the epidemic control measures in the spring, Zhejiang authorities were able to help breeding material suppliers for rice seedlings resume production quickly. Hangzhou Jinhai Agriculture Technology Co, which usually contributes 70 percent of such materials in Zhejiang, achieved an output of 3,606 metric tons this year, up 12 percent year-on-year.

Over the entire period of early-season rice growth, Zhejiang's agriculture institutes opened a total of 1,160 training programs for more than 53,000 farmers.