After he had completed the busy spring plowing season, Jia Bingpeng began looking forward to another bumper harvest.

The 50-year-old has worked his land at Puyang Farm of the Beidahuang Agricultural Reclamation Group, a State-owned enterprise in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, for more than 30 years.

"Last year, the profit from my 13 hectares of rice was 170,000 yuan ($26,400)," he said. "With the help of modern agricultural technology and machinery, such as unmanned rice planters, I believe I will see high-quality rice and high yields this autumn."

"Beidahuang" originally referred to a fertile region, including the Sanjiang Plain along the Heilong and Nenjiang rivers, in a large wasteland in the north of Heilongjiang.

In 1947, before the founding of the People's Republic of China, a group of military cadres from Yan'an and nearby Nanniwan in Shaanxi province, led their troops to Beidahuang to develop what would become the first State-owned farms.

On Jan 24, 1958, the central government approved a directive mobilizing 100,000 veterans to participate in the further building of Beidahuang, receiving a strong response from across the country.

"At that time, Beidahuang had been developing for more than 10 years and 54 farms had been founded," said Zhao Guochun, former director of the Beidahuang Museum in Harbin, Heilongjiang's capital. "The 100,000 veterans who came to Beidahuang were an important source of labor and played an inestimable role in economic construction."

In the decades that followed, about 1 million "educated youths", who had been sent to the countryside to learn from the farmers, came to the region to help, often enduring great difficulties.