As my country's autumn grain harvest continues to usher in large-scale harvests, various regions and departments have launched a series of Chinese Farmers' Harvest Festival activities with the theme of "Harvest opens a new chapter and hard work promotes revitalization". The Harvest Festival is not only a cultural spectacle to celebrate the harvest, but also an economic opportunity to stimulate consumption and activate industries. Since the launch of the Harvest Festival during the golden autumn consumption season, it has driven a cumulative sales of agricultural products exceeding 160 billion yuan.
The “15th Five-Year Plan for Accelerating Agricultural and Rural Modernization” issued in June this year proposed to promote the deep integration of agriculture with culture, tourism, education, health care, sports and other industries. This inspires us to use festivals as media to combine new business formats such as short videos and rural tourism with local cultural resources, so that festival "traffic" can be deposited into industrial increments and transformed into increased income for farmers. Among them, improving local products is the foundation, attracting market flow is the key, strengthening offline consumption is the path, and dividing value-added benefits is fundamental. The integration of the four is a pragmatic move to promote the integrated development of rural primary, secondary, and tertiary industries.
Make refined local products and consolidate the supply base. The agricultural solar terms, local food, traditional skills and folk stories carry distinctive regional characteristics and contain exploitable industrial value. By the end of 2025, a total of 14,900 intangible cultural heritage workshops have been established across the country. We can rely on such carriers to combine skill transfer, product production and experiential services to turn "fingertip skills" into a "fingertip economy": focus on the advantageous planting and breeding industry to improve the quality of raw materials and develop intensive processing and comprehensive utilization; combine traditional skills with modern design to develop food, handicrafts and experience courses with local characteristics, promote the development of high-quality and branded local specialties, and prepare good products for rural tourism and online sales.
Take advantage of short videos to attract market traffic. The countryside does not lack good products, good scenery, and good stories. What it lacks is channels for being seen. Mobile phone live broadcasts and short videos have lowered the communication threshold: farmers demonstrate planting and harvesting, returning youth record village changes, allowing specialty agricultural products to reach urban tables directly. In 2025, the national online retail sales of agricultural products will reach 783.31 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9.9%. For online popularity to become a lasting sales, the key lies in quality and reputation: stable quality and reliable supply chain to undertake the communication effect, improve the pre-cooling of origin, graded packaging and other supporting facilities, promote the upgrading of primary agricultural products into characteristic brands carrying regional characteristics and market reputation, and turn "Internet celebrities" into "long-lasting celebrities".
Develop rural tourism and promote offline consumption. Activities such as farming experiences, rice field concerts, harvest markets, and intangible cultural heritage displays allow tourists to experience local culture through participation, and also drive consumption of food, accommodation, shopping, and study. At present, 1,597 national-level key rural tourism villages and towns have been built across the country, and more than 60,000 administrative villages have launched rural tourism operations; rural residents made 1.526 billion domestic trips throughout the year, and their travel expenditure exceeded 1 trillion yuan - urban and rural areas travel in both directions, and rural consumption potential is accelerated. More importantly, rural tourism is not just a short-term growth in catering and accommodation, but also connects tourist consumption and local production. It is necessary to guide B&B and catering business entities to establish stable supply relationships with family farms, cooperatives, and processing enterprises, so that a table of farm meals can drive the purchase of agricultural products, and a study tour can drive food processing, so as to extend the space for value-added "one after another".
Improve cooperation with farmers and support farmers, and properly distribute value-added benefits. The quality of industrial integration ultimately depends on whether farmers benefit. It is necessary to use reasonable organizational methods and distribution mechanisms to put the benefits from product sales, tourism services, and cultural experiences into the hands of farmers: promote order farming and guaranteed purchase, so that farmers can share the added value of processing; cultivate new business entities composed of family farms, cooperatives, and leading enterprises to allow farmers to obtain wage income from nearby employment; improve interest linkage mechanisms such as joint-stock cooperation and guaranteed dividends, so that farmers can use land, skills, housing and other resources to become shares and share the benefits of industrial development. At the same time, we should ensure reasonable remuneration for rural craftsmen and representative inheritors of intangible cultural heritage in skill display and content creation, so that farmers can be both creators and disseminators of rural culture, as well as participants and beneficiaries of integrated development.
A good harvest is not only a tribute to hard work, but also a accumulation of energy for the future. Celebrating the harvest is not only a celebration of a bumper harvest, but also a way to build momentum for strengthening rural industries and bulging farmers’ pockets. We must adhere to farmers as the main body, the main line of agriculture, and the home field of rural areas, turn resources into products, turn traffic into sales, and turn value-added into income, and bear more fruitful results in enriching people and strengthening villages on the new journey of accelerating the construction of an agricultural power.
