“In China, most of the garlic planting and harvesting is done by hand. The two main challenges that garlic growers face are rising labour costs and difficulties finding young farmers that want to join the industry. Young people are moving to cities and are pursuing different kinds of careers outside agriculture. Our vision is to develop and produce machines that are specially designed for garlic farming. By industrialising production, yields will improve, and perhaps the sector can retain its workforce”, explains Lydia Xin.
The team of the Factum Group
“We design planting machines, cropping, harvesting, peeling and sorting machines. We also produce specialised equipment to be used in cold warehouse. We try to cover the full product range. Some of the equipment has been available for longer, for example, garlic sorting equipment. The planting and harvesting machines, however, are entirely new for the industry.”
“In cooperation with a Spanish grower and Chinese agriculture research institute we have developed planting and harvesting machines that meet the needs of Chinese growers. In China, planting space between garlic bulbs is approximately 18 centimeters. This is different than the 35 centimers used by Spanish growers. Within the hour, our machine can plant 3,000 square meters. This is ten times more than a person can plant by hand, which is 300 square meters.”
“Our clients are mainly bigger farms, and some smaller ones that use our machines through brokers. Now my guess is that 5% or less of Shandong farms use planting and harvesting machines. This is much lower than sorting equipment, which is used by 80% of farms. The market potential is huge. We also aspire to export our equipment. We have sold some first machines to India and are looking for other opportunities abroad."
Design and production factory
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Lydia Xin