Research On Development Of Apple Cultivation In Luochuan County

The paper has a comprehensive retrospect of Luochuan county's 50 years'history on apple cultivation, and gives a more in-depth summary on development condition in recent 10 years. Thus, this paper has a clear and explicit understanding on general development of Luochuan County's apple cultivation. On this basis, the author carries out detailed investigation to look into the running conditions of Luochuan apple's cultivation. It collects 500 valid questionnaires in 96 rural villages from 5 towns. This paper uses database management to process those questionnaires. In results, it gets a large number of valuable raw data and statistical results. The content almost includes every aspect on apple's production and sale.Survey results show that the material input per household on apple production in Luochuan from 2006 to 2008 was 10078 yuan, 1154 yuan per acre. The production costs increased 0.45 times from 2006 to 2008. The employee costs increased 2.48 times over the same period. The increasing rate of employee cost was 5.5 times higher than the increasing rate of material costs .Labor costs which include family members account for 63.54% of the total cost of the production in 2006, which increased to 79.91% in 2009. And its proportion in the total cost had increased from 52.54% in 2007 to 72.25% in 2009. Thus it presents new challenges to Luochuan apple's cultivation. The paper summarizes the county's main approach to this challenge, based on which the author proposes to promote cultivation techniques for"labor saving", and then adds some comments to improve the mechanization level of the orchard.Although the Luochuan apple has a high reputation all over the country, even in foreign countries, its market risk remains high. Financial crisis originated from the US in 2007 lead to a decrease of the sale price in 2008 from 3.6 yuan per kilogram to 1.4 yuan per kilogram. Then it reduced the net income of farmers' in more than 300 million yuan, 7000 yuan per household, 600 yuan per acre. The paper makes a conclusion of how to control the market risk in the county, base on which the author proposes to expand the proportion of pre-orders and to carry out the market risk insurance pilot project on apples.Through the investigation the paper finds that the deep contradictions which influence the Luochuan County's future development of apple cultivation are the lag behind in the second and third industry, the low level of urbanization, the weak mobilization of agricultural labor, farmers'resistance on the modern management of model, the lack of deep-processing technology. This paper gives a deep theoretical analysis on these deep contradictions and makes some specific suggestions and strategies.