Implement the "Four Unifications" and Bring into Full Play the Role of Farm Machinery

Yantai District in Shandong Province is one of the areas in our country in which a comparatively good job has been done in the mechanization of agriculture. Compared with 1965, by 1977 the whole area had increased its power-driven machinery for agricultural use by 15 times, tractors by 58 times and irrigation machinery by 9 times. Now the entire district has more than 29,200 tractors and over 105,900 pieces of irrigation and drainage machinery and has a total of 1,989,700 horsepower of power-driven machinery, averaging 178.5 horsepower per production brigade. By 1977, as much as 59 percent of the cultivated area of the district was plowed by machinery, 61.6 percent of the total sown acreage was seeded by machinery, and 72.6 percent of the total irrigated land was irrigated by machinery. The advance in the level of mechanization of agriculture has expedited the development of agricultural production. In the meantime, however, many new problems have cropped up whose solution provides a challenge. For example, 90 percent of the tractors in the district are owned by the brigades. Because farm machinery and implements are not evenly distributed and the crops do not mature at the same time, some of the production brigades and teams urgently need farm machinery and implements while others have their machinery and implements lie idle during the busy farming seasons in summer and fall. Lacking a complete set of accessories, some tractors cannot run at their full capacity. All this serves to illustrate that the form of "I buy it, I use it, and I manage it" in using and managing agricultural machinery has become an impediment to giving full play to the role of agricultural machinery. This is not in keeping with the greatly expanded productive forces resulting from the mechanization of agriculture. In order to solve this contradiction, Yantai District summed up and popularized in the fall of 1974 the experience of the "four unifications" of Xiyou Commune of Yexian >u>xian>/u> in using agricultural machinery. Starting from the summer of 1974, this commune, based on the principle of free volition and mutual benefit, put all the agricultural machinery of the various brigades under the charge of the commune during the busy farming seasons in summer and fall in order to implement the system of unified command, unified operation, unified maintenance and unified accounting. In this way, they were able to expand the role of agricultural machinery during the busy farming seasons. Out of the 303 people's communes in Yantai District, 143 had already adopted the management and operation method of the "four unifications" as of last year. The rest of the communes will implement the same method this year. Quite a few >u>xian>/u> and communes have implemented the method, not only in the busy farming seasons but also in the struggle against natural disasters and in capital construction on farmland.