WUHAN, Sept. 24 (Xinhua) -- Clad in leather and wearing a bamboo hat, Xiong Tongsheng is busy harvesting lotus root in a field with his fellow farmers in the city of Honghu, central China's Hubei Province.

Lotus root is a popular aquatic vegetable in China. The country has the largest lotus root farming area and highest yield in the world, with the total area covering 400,000 hectares. Hubei's farming area accounts for about one-fifth of the country's total, with an annual production value of around 6 billion yuan (882 million U.S. dollars).

Honghu is a major lotus root farming area in Hubei. This year, despite the impact of COVID-19 and flooding that has ravaged the province in recent months, Xiong has been delighted by the rich harvest.

"The harvest period for lotus root is relatively long. We can keep harvesting it until April next year," Xiong said, adding that the increasing price of the plant has offset the impact of a yield drop over the past few months.

Xiong and his colleagues now spend five to six hours in the fields as demand has been increasing since mid-July, when this year's harvest was first put on the market.

Hong Xiaojun, who heads a local cooperative selling lotus root, said the cooperative receives orders for around 20 tonnes of fresh lotus root every day, which is mainly sold to south China's Guangdong Province and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, as well as to Southeast Asia.

"The epidemic and floods have affected about one-eighth of the yield, but with the rising price, our revenue has remained at about the same level as last year," Hong said.

The cooperative is now mainly working on export orders and has invested 12 million yuan in a more automated processing workshop.

The Hubei government has taken measures to mitigate the impacts that COVID-19 and floods have had on farmers.

The local agricultural and rural affairs department has launched a campaign mobilizing government officials to help match online and offline agricultural product demand with businesses within and outside the province.

Li Tongbao manages a pepper farm in Hubei and was worried about his business in February, the peak time to plant pepper seedlings, as the province was experiencing the height of the epidemic.

The local government guided farmers to stagger working shifts in the fields and coordinated with agricultural material departments to provide delivery services online, which helped ensure agricultural production continued.

As the harvest season arrived, Li was happy to see red peppers clustering in the fields. "With a higher average price, they will bring in quite a substantial return," he said. Enditem