A farmer reaps wheat from his fields with a harvester in Shanxi's Yongji city. [Photo by Li Xiangdong for China Daily]

Reaping wheat is a race against time. During this critical period for harvesting, spanning from May to June, weather and efficiency are crucial.

This is especially true in Shanxi province, a major wheat producing region in North China.

Xu Bingkuan, a resident in the village of Lyuliang in Hejin city, was happy to see a harvesting machine begin to work on his 0.33-hectare wheat farm, with the grains cut and channeled into a threshing drum.

"We estimated that the total output is about 1,800 kilograms," the farmer said. "But it is when the grains are in the threshing drum that we can say there is a good yield for this year."

By June 11, more than 133,000 hectares of wheat had been harvested in Shanxi, which accounted for 24.21 percent of the province's total growing area of the crop, according to the Shanxi Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

Shanxi's wheat planting area surpassed 550,000 hectares this year, 16,000 hectares more than the figure in 2022.

The province became rainy in late May, a time when wheat turns mature and is ready for harvest. Due to the weather, great efficiency is needed during harvesting to prevent the grains from going moldy or germinating, according to local officials.

For this purpose, Shanxi has mobilized a total of 15,000 harvesting machines to reap wheat throughout the province.

Wang Xue is a manager at the modern farming development center of Yuncheng, a city in the south of Shanxi. He is responsible for the leasing of farming machines.

"Reminded by the weather forecast, we have had our harvesting machines ready since mid-May," Wang said.

"We have tailored solutions for various farm terrains," he said. "There are 159 combine harvesters for large, flat farms and hundreds of smaller machines for terraced fields."

The manager added that with these machines in place, 99 percent of harvesting work in the city of Yuncheng will be completed by machines, offering great efficiency that is badly needed in the rainy weather.

Gao Tianshe, an operator of a big wheat farm in the city's Jinjing township, said he was grateful for the help of local farming machine leasing companies.

"Despite days of rain, the yield and quality of grains can be ensured for this year thanks to the efficient actions of harvesting machines."

The good news for farmers in the central and northern regions of Shanxi, where the wheat harvest lasts about 20 days from early June, was that the weather forecasts showed reduced precipitation during the period.

In Shanxi, the growth of wheat is a half-year-long process from the winter sowing to summer harvest. And the care of the crop requires persistent and painstaking efforts.

And the efforts are by no means reduced in an era of farming modernization, which helps to improve efficiency on the one hand and calls for more complicated skills on the other, according to Zhao Zhongwei, an official at the Shanxi Farming Machines Development Center.

To help farmers master new skills and techniques, Zhao said his center and other agriculture-related institutions in Shanxi have put training farmers and offering technical assistance high on their agenda.

These institutions have arranged more than 14,000 trips for farming experts to assist farmers in various locales in Shanxi since the beginning of this year.

Zhao said the current harvesting season is the busiest for the staff members of his center and similar institutions.

"We have to allocate personnel to various sites in rural Shanxi, adjusting harvesting machines' parameters to meet different terrain and weather conditions," Zhao said. "Our goal is to maximize the efficiency and minimize the losses caused by adverse weather."

Wang Xiujuan and Zhang Zhigang contributed to this story.