(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-02-03 23:19

A total of 9.4 million hectares of farmland, mainly located in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, was hit by the snow. Among these, about 1.08 million hectares had lost all of their output to the bad weather, according to a report on the MOA website on Sunday.

The MOA dispatched 13 teams of experts to eight of the worst-hit provinces and technicians at all levels were going into the fields and helping farmers to combat the disaster, according to the website.

In Jiangxi, more than 40,000 farming technicians in more than 300 teams are helping farmers reduce their losses.

"We have had freezing disasters before but the crops could recover in two or three days. The 20-day-long cold snap made our previous experience of no use. Most of the 5,000 mu (333 hectares) of vegetables in our village have been frozen to death," said farmer Zhang.

Min Yuezhong, Nanchang Municipal Vegetable Promotion Center director, who was giving guidance to farmers in the village on Sunday, said: "We have used many technologies that have seldom been used in the south to combat the disaster, such as channeling the underground water to warm up the pond, firing straw to fume the trees."

"The new technologies are both challenges to us technicians and to the farmers."

Despite the continuing poor weather, the farmers effort to combat the snow has given hope for the 2008 harvest.

Most of the one million hectares of winter crops in the province have being applied to various anti-freezing measures. This has reduced the losses at the utmost, said Mao Huizhong, head of the Jiangxi Provincial Agriculture Department, on Sunday.

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