Mechanical millet planting at Quzhou Experimental Station

My knowledge of millet production was not as vast as that of maize, since the latter forms the staple food in Zimbabwe. One day I joined my Chinese colleague Peng Pu, two Chinese farmers, and a tractor driver to plant millet. Zheng 16 and Zheng 18 were used for the field experiment. Planting was done following a previous mung bean crop that we had recently harvested.

Basal fertilizer was applied together with the millet seeds in both the whole-farm mechanization experiment and the millet mung bean rotation experiment. Since the planter that was used was specifically for millet, we could not plant maize in our plots. Arrangements were underway to carry out the activity within a few days. During the exercise, I was overjoyed to take part in driving the tractor while planting millet.