Here we are bemoaning the demise of the family farm – we’re still bemoaning that, right? – and along come some people who are back at the other end of the story, determined to make their small farms bigger and more efficient.

Here’s hoping they enjoy the air-conditioned tractors and 24-row planters but avoid crushing debts.

A business group from China is wrapping up an American visit that included trips to Chicago and Houston but centered on Iowa State University. The eight men and women represent the Longping High-Tech Agriculture Co., founded by a man who also has visited Central Iowa. Yuan Longping was a co-winner of the 2004 World Food Prize, honored at the State Capitol in recognition of his great success in boosting rice production in China and around the world.

No doubt as a result of that trip, a Longping management team arrived in 2006 to check out ISU, Monsanto and Pioneer. Then came this year’s expedition, involving lots of talks with university people as well as visits to farms, co-ops, the Sauer-Danfoss manufacturing plant in Ames and even the Dale Carnegie Institute here in Des Moines, all coordinated by the ISU Extension Service.

Longping High-Tech began operations in 1999. The company sells a broad range of seeds; manufactures and sells chemicals and fertilizers; and provides advice and training to farmers.

The company, and China in general, are looking for answers to problems that we ran into some time ago. For one thing, farmers are dropping their hoes and heading for jobs in the cities. It sounds like what happened here a few decades back, when so many farm boys decided they had baled enough hay in the hot sun and went off to work in the factories of Chicago and Detroit.

In response to the resulting shortage of farm labor, “the government is supporting farmers to help them enlarge the size of their fields,” said Yang Zhong Ju, an assistant general manager at Longping’s International Hybrid Rice Development Co. subsidiary. “The government has removed all agricultural taxes and provides a subsidy to farmers” to help them buy modern equipment and seeds, he said.

Governmental subsidies to farmers – that sounds familiar, too.

The Longping company also would like to give its farm customers better access to information, so the visitors went to the Chicago Board of Trade to see how that works. China has a similar pricing system, according to Danny Zhou, Longping’s chief officer of human resources and administration, but individual farmers don’t know much about it.

Zhou said her company might be willing to invest in an effort to provide farmers with computers and Internet connections.

On that topic, our history is relatively short. Iowa farmers now sit at computers tracing the intricacies of global grain prices, but it wasn’t all that long ago when they had to stay within listening distance of a radio tuned to WHO.

Mary Holz-Clause, an associate vice president with ISU Extension, said this is the first time her organization has worked with a company based in another nation. “We hope this is the beginning of a good, solid relationship,” she said. The company back home picked up the tab, making the welcome here that much warmer.

Overall, the focus of the trip is helping Chinese farmers become better managers. “After we go back,” Yang said, “we will think about how to find ways to supply better products and services to farmers.”

Darwin Miller, Hardin County Extension director, said by phone that the group spent a morning learning how various layers of government – from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to the state of Iowa to the county boards – weave together to make the extension system function. In the afternoon, they visited the co-op in Garden City and inspected a good-sized farming operation.

Talking later in Ames, Yang and Zhou seemed to be impressed not only by the scale of our agribusiness, but also the concept of a co-op – a one-stop shop where farmers can buy chemicals and seeds and store or sell the harvested crop.

Plus, a co-op is an excellent place to drink coffee and criticize the government. We learned that a long time ago, too.