During the spring plowing season, the quality of agricultural supplies directly affects the agricultural harvest for the entire year and is a crucial link in ensuring food security. Recently, the Luquan County Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau, jointly with the Market Supervision Administration, formed a special inspection team, deploying 12 key personnel divided into 3 groups to carry out the agricultural supply safety “Spring Guardian” campaign across the county's 17 townships (sub-districts), building a multi-faceted safety defense line for spring plowing production.
This operation prioritized key agricultural supplies in urgent demand by farmers, such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and agricultural films. It delved into agricultural supply stores along main township roads and around bazaars, as well as storage points in remote villages, achieving “no blind spots” in inspection coverage. Law enforcement officers strictly verified qualification documents such as business licenses and pesticide operation licenses of business entities, carefully checked labeling information on product packaging such as production dates, shelf lives, and ingredient content, and conducted on-site sampling of over 20 batches of fertilizers and 15 batches of seeds for submission to the county agricultural product quality and safety testing center. Meanwhile, they urged operators to improve purchase ledgers and the system of requesting invoices and certificates, requiring that every transaction of agricultural supplies be traceable to the manufacturer, batch, and flow direction, thereby preventing fake or inferior agricultural supplies from entering the market at the source.
Addressing strong complaints from farmers regarding issues such as low germination rates of fake seeds and insufficient active ingredients in fertilizers, the inspection team set up consultation desks in areas with concentrated agricultural supply sales, such as Sayinpan Town and Pingshan Town, distributing over 500 copies of the “Practical Manual for Identifying Agricultural Supplies.” Through physical comparisons, they taught farmers hands-on how to distinguish fake or inferior agricultural supplies — for instance, using methods like “observing particle uniformity and smelling the odor” to distinguish qualified fertilizers from inferior ones, and using techniques like “checking anti-counterfeiting codes and verifying packaging integrity” to identify fake seeds. As of now, the joint inspection team has inspected 86 agricultural supply operators, discovered and rectified on-site 12 issues such as blurry label information and incomplete ledger records, issued notices of order for rectification to 3 operators who failed to rectify issues adequately, and found no major quality issues so far.
In the next step, Luquan County will establish a normalized supervision mechanism of “daily inspections + special inspections + random spot checks,” conducting agricultural supply market inspections once a month and organizing cross-departmental joint inspections once every quarter. They will carry out “follow-up inspections” for areas with prominent issues, continuously tighten the “safety valve” for agricultural supply quality, ensure farmers use safe and qualified agricultural products, and lay a solid foundation for a bumper agricultural harvest throughout the year.
