Zhang Liancheng, a 63-year-old farmer in northeast China's Jilin Province, never dreamed he could one day free himself from toiling in the fields.

Just three years ago, Zhang, like many other farmers in China, spent most of his time in the fields, sowing, plowing and reaping. However, a whole year's hard work only brought him 20,000 yuan (2,946 U.S. dollars) in return.

Zhang's life completely changed in May 2008 when he joined a local farmer cooperative. "I became a shareholder of the cooperative by giving 2.5 hectares of farmland to it. The cooperative takes care of my land thereafter and gives me the dividend at year's end in accordance with my shares," Zhang said, adding that he was paid 17,500 yuan by the cooperative last year.

Although his earnings generated from his farmland dropped slightly, Zhang now had the freedom to take on another job in a nearby factory, which offered him 20,000 yuan a year.

"Thanks to the cooperative, I could look for other jobs and my annual income almost doubled," Zhang said.

The founder of the cooperative, Song Xiangchi, said bringing together farmlands from separate households allowed for the greater use of mechanization and therefore saved manpower.

"The aim of the cooperative is to organize farmland together to achieve a scale effect and produce more efficiently," he said.

"Over 200 households have joined the cooperative and I expect more to come," Song said.

Song's cooperative is just one of those organizations in China that help increase farmers' income. Chen Jianhua, a senior analyst with the Research Center on Rural Economy of the Ministry of Agriculture, said since the late 1980s, farmer cooperative organizations have developed rapidly all over the country. As of March 2010, China has over 270,000 farmer cooperatives.

"These new cooperative organizations are different from the cooperatives in the 1950s and 1960s, known as 'the People's Commune,'" Chen said at the sidelines of the ninth China Changchun Agricultural and Food Fair.

The People's Commune regime, under which the communes exercised management and control of all rural resources, collapsed in the late 1970s as its economic inefficiencies robbed farmers of their incentive. It was gradually replaced by the Household Responsibility System, under which each rural household is an independent management unit, possessing limited liability and capacity over its production factors.

The Household Responsibility System succeeded in motivating individual farmers to work, but it left farmers to face the ever-changing market directly.

"Farmers may face various obstacles in accessing essential inputs, such as seed, fertilizer, and capital, and may also have difficulty in selling their products. Rural cooperatives could play the coordinating role between production and marketing," said Zhang Lei, director of the Department of Rural Forestry Reform and Development of the State Forestry Administration.

Huang Zuhui, head of the China Academy of Rural Development of Zhejiang University, echoed Zhang Lei's view. Huang said the survival of farmers depends on how, and to what extent, they meet the demands of the final consumers. "It's really hard for individual farmers to cater to the rapidly-changing market," Huang said.

Huang also said China still lags behind many developed economies in the building of rural cooperatives.

"80 percent of farmers in Japan joined rural cooperatives in the first decade after the World War II. But many farmers in China's remote areas have never joined any cooperatives till now," he said.